‘O! What a fall was there, my countrymen’

Julius Caesar

ON May Day, 1940, the first day of a week which was to see one of those hermetic processes of history in which the codes and conduct of an epoch are sealed away, the Leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, by private notice, inquired of the Prime Minister when it would be possible for him to make a statement on the position in Norway. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Mr. Chamberlain. The House then went on to discuss such imperative matters as sheep on the Kentish farms being frightened by low-flying aeroplanes, unemployment in the hardstone industry, Scottish hotels which charged naval officers an extra threepence for a cup of coffee, the reduction of unemployment on the island of St. Helena, fraudulent solicitors, the condition of Aldershot slaughterhouse, the plight of hackle-makers in Dundee and whether quack medicines should be advertised in stamp-books. All this and more having been aired if not settled, the House then went on to debate the novel but extremely inadequate proposals put forward in the first war-time budget. Sir John Simon had presented this on St. George’s Day. He had put sixpence on income tax, bringing it up to 7s. 6d., but as he had done this once before the Press was deprived of its jolly joke—‘Simon the tanner’—and so had to make what it could of the Chancellor’s interesting levy which he intended to put on sales, and which was to be called ‘purchase tax’. As well as these taxes, everybody with an income of more than £1,500 was to pay surtax, beer was to go up by a penny a pint, whisky was up by 15s. a gallon and letters were to cost 2½d. This last tax was thought to be the worst. Everybody insisted that it was immoral and brutal because, due to the war, families were scattered all over the place, and it amounted to a tax on the affections. Finally, Sir John said that there would be a tax on war fortunes—after the war.

The war had now been in progress for 240 days, though progress was hardly the word for the profound status quo of the Siegfried and Maginot Lines. At home the black-out had been exalted to a degree where it had become a kind of tyranny. Maintaining its perfection became a wholly absorbing preoccupation for a large part of the population. It was called the Bore War and the Phoney War, and, as a cool but beautiful autumn drifted into a bitter winter and the winter into a perfect spring without a hint of carnage, Mr. Chamberlain was sufficiently heartened to declare that Hitler ‘had missed the bus’.

The false peace was an unutterable personal solace to him. He was not the kind of man who could take a detached view of agony. A battle was not ‘a battle’ to him; it was a thousand bereavements; countless hurts of body and mind. The deaths and suffering of sailors, soldiers and airmen haunted his sleep. He was seventy-one years old and, as day followed day, and still the blood-bath held off and the great Western cities, which so many people thought would by now have been Wellsian infernoes, awoke intact, there grew in Mr. Chamberlain’s breast the faintest of all faint hopes that by simply declaring war France and Great Britain had out-bluffed the Führer, and that Germany would destroy her own leaders in her own time. And without outside help. Nothing that Hitler had done annoyed him so much as the fact that this dreadful man had forced him, Neville Chamberlain, the man of peace, to go to war. But having gone to war he discovered a mysterious situation which did not compel him to make war. Thereafter, what seemed like a dilatoriness unparalleled even by Ethelred the Unready was really the nerve-rackingly deliberate policy of the British Prime Minister as he faced the greatest raider of all time. And such was the general relief that the horrors of the First World War were not being repeated that the do-nothing attitude of the Premier had a far greater support than might have been supposed at that time. Many people began to dislike Hitler more for having tricked poor Mr. Chamberlain than for having raped Poland. It did not seem unduly strange that he should have come to the microphone on September 3rd, 1939, so seething with personal disappointment and private irritation that his announcement of the second half of the terrible twentieth-century tragedy was a mass of ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’ and ‘my’s’.

‘You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different, that I could have done … everything I have worked for, everything I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much….’

He had no sooner finished speaking than the sirens wailed in scarifying derision and the cool blue sky over London filled with barrage balloons whose tethered silken spheres glittered delightfully. While the world took cover, the Churchills climbed out on to the roof of their house to see what was going on. Nothing was going on, and with everybody feeling a bit of a fool the shelters emptied. Thus, from the very beginning of hostilities the precedent of peace in war was established and Chamberlain succumbed to its tentative charms. ‘To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy; a languid war does not save blood and money, but squanders them.’ So said Macaulay. Neville Chamberlain had a mandate for finding out whether this statement was true which was unsurpassed in the political history of England, and he intended to exercise it.

‘It may be, but I have a feeling that it won’t be so very long. There is a widespread desire to avoid war, and it is so deeply rooted, that it surely must find expression somehow. Of course the difficulty is with Hitler himself. Until he disappears and his system collapses, there can be no peace. But what I hope for is not a military victory—I very much doubt the feasibility of that—but a collapse of the German home front….’

He hoped we would not start bombing ‘unless they begin it’. He deplored that ‘we have to kill one another just to satisfy that accursed madman’. And he told the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘You will understand how hateful I find my personal position. I simply can’t bear to think of those gallant fellows who lost their lives last night in the R.A.F. attack, and of their families….’ Six weeks after this he said, ‘How I do hate and loathe this war. I was never meant to be a war minister, and the thought of all those homes wrecked with the Royal Oak makes me want to hand over my responsibilities to someone else.’

Added to this extreme personal revulsion for those duties which now belonged to his great office and from which he continued to pray that a miracle might release him, there was the further embarrassment of the Labour and Liberal parties’ refusal to join any government which he headed. All three parties were agreed on the necessity of stopping Hitler but the lack of coalition led to a marvellous dissipation of national strength which heartened fascists everywhere. To the undisguised relief of the entire country, Chamberlain had given Winston Churchill the Admiralty, the post he had held in the First World War. He had also given him a seat in the Cabinet. The two, so disparate, men worked together in surprising harmony and this was a small compensation for the greater political divide. Not the least instance of Churchill’s genius was his tact during the first eight months of the war, when the tragic defeatist attitude of his chief was not only in exasperating conflict with his own views, but produced in the country at large a climate of despair which, when the time at last came, needed all his passion and eloquence to dispel. Hence the Sophoclean grimness of the ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech delivered as a sad, stark truth, and not as parliamentary histrionics.

But this speech was still an age away from the autumn of 1939. Only five weeks after he had declared war on German fascism, Neville Chamberlain received, in three days, 1,860 letters beseeching him to stop the war. Sir Oswald Mosley, on the eve of his internment, concurred with these correspondents and humanely advised the Government ‘to make peace now, with Britain undefeated and unexhausted’. Between these pacific extremes there began to exist a quite unwarrantable hopefulness that the whole unexciting business would soon peter out. Evacuees swarmed back home and everywhere there was tedium, purposelessness and ennui.

The chief obstacle to this sweet complacency was Churchill. On October 1st he made his first war-time broadcast and the country heard the strangely authoritative orotund diction with a certain cautious interest. In November he came to the microphone again and although in this speech he paid fulsome tributes to Chamberlain and insisted, in spite of much gossip to the contrary, that he and the Prime Minister saw eye to eye, it was obvious to anyone able to hear between the lines, as it were, that there could be no sharper division than that which separated the thinking of these two men. Although Churchill was sixty-four in 1939, his years in the wilderness with trowel and easel had left him with his political vigour intact. He was, both physically and mentally, in astounding contrast to most of the Cabinet, who were grey with office. There is something peculiarly invigorating in having one’s predictions proved right—even if they happen to be one’s worst fears justified—and the Cassandra of the thirties had every reason to crow, ‘I told you so!’ Only he was too busy to do this or even to attend the House as often as he would have liked to have done. While what Chamberlain called ‘the twilight war’ continued and soldier and civilian alike kicked their heels, the First Lord of the Admiralty worked furiously.

New wars must recollect the precedents set by old wars but must not be bound by them. One of the things recollected by Churchill in 1939 was that Norwegian territorial waters were mined in 1917 and that they would have to be mined again if the blockade of Germany was to be of the slightest use. On November 19th he reminded the Cabinet of this. He also reminded it that huge transportations of Swedish iron ore were being made via Narvik, a port high up on the 1,000-mile Norwegian coastline. Neither Narvik nor Norway itself seemed at all important at that time to Churchill’s colleagues and nothing was done. All Churchill’s insistence could not make them think otherwise. Yet there was to be something almost occult in his correct guess that Norway held a very special significance in the German grand strategy. While everybody concentrated upon the stalemate in France, he thought continually of that vast rake-like coast where the sea slipped into countless secret fjords.

Narvik is an outlandish place in which to wind up an era and a trading document is a dull kind of literature across which to write ‘finis’ as an epoch, with all its hopes, vanities and concepts, dies. Germany’s munition factories had to have iron ore from Sweden. In winter it was fairly simple. The ore could be shipped from the far north of Norway and carried for over a thousand miles in the safety of Norway’s territorial waters. When Churchill made his plan to mine the waters and put a stop to this trade, the Foreign Office immediately stepped in with a reminder of Norway’s neutrality, something which had meant nothing to Hitler.

On November 30th Stalin attacked Finland and so great was the moral outcry that such a huge power should make war on such a minute one that the British Government got together a special contingent of soldiers with ski-ing experience and would have sent them to Finland’s aid—except that both Norway and Sweden, each in fear and trembling of Germany who was now Russia’s bizarre ally under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, refused to allow them passage. So the Finnish aid brigade, like nearly every other brigade in the British Army, kicked its heels while, to the pleasure and amazement of the Allies, the Finns gave the Russians a single-handed thrashing. Narvik, after this, as Churchill said, suddenly took on a sentimental value. It became famous as the gateway which led to these Finnish Davids who were slinging a new pebble called the Molotov Cocktail at the Red Goliath and bringing him low with it.

Christmas came and went and found the Allies and their enemy still glumly lined up with scarcely a shot fired. The United States watched with a detachment which was fast deteriorating into coldness. At home, the extent of the war effort and the sense of crisis and immediacy can be assessed by the fact that at the beginning of 1940 there were still over a million unemployed men shuffling through the labour exchanges. Early in January Chamberlain sacked the sensitive and extraordinarily intelligent, though unconventional, Leslie Hore-Belisha from the War Office and put in his place the rather usual Oliver Stanley. Industry sagged. The moral fervour which had backed the Government’s ultimatum to the Führer on September 3rd evaporated. Early in the new year, a deathly complacency, which would have been bad enough in peace-time but which when civilization was in greater jeopardy than at any other time since the Dark Ages was either lunatic or criminal, blanketed Britain and France. The B.E.F. alone appeared to be isolated from this ‘sinister trance’, as Churchill called it, and prepared itself for fighting.

In February there was a vivid adventure in the perplexing Scandinavian seas which once more jolted everyone’s attention back to Norway. H.M.S. Cossack boarded the Altmark and found its hold stuffed with nearly 300 British merchant seamen on their way to the Nazi prisons. The Norwegians had ‘searched’ this ship and had declared that they had ‘found nothing’. The rescue had a certain boyish gaiety and it rallied the flaccid emotions of the nation. Everybody enjoyed its Drake-like temerity while at the same time they experienced, many for the first time, a sharp awareness that this rescue of 300 seamen would not have happened had not the First Lord and the Captain of the Cossack, Philip Vian, departed from the sacred letter of the law. From now on dismay and unease at the direction of the war began to affect the country. The Prime Minister and his colleagues still exacted a glowing respect but under this rosy surface there was a deep-seated malady which no amount of individual gallantry could dispel.

In March, after a fight which had stripped the Red Army of its mythology, Finland collapsed, an event which brought the Führer and the Duce hurriedly together at the Brenner Pass. What now? Was the boredom to be broken? The sudden uncertainty trundled the British and French governments into some kind of lugubrious preparedness and, at last, on April 8th, as rumours accumulated of Germany’s plans to capture Scandinavia and thus make sure of the Swedish iron, Churchill was at last allowed to carry out the plan to mine Norwegian waters. It was done very early in the morning of that day. And that same evening Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway. Oslo, a city of 300,000 people, was taken by fifteen hundred Germans marching through its hypnotized streets to a brass band. The King and government fled to the north and a Major Vidkund Quisling was to enjoy a fortnight’s heady power as the Führer’s satrap and some kind of immortality when his name went into the dictionaries as a synonym for ‘traitor’.

At home, scales fell from eyes, woolly party loyalties were discarded and dear old British tolerance evaporated. If the socialists and liberals would not serve under Chamberlain, then a prime minister would have to be found whom they could—and must—serve under, for party politics were a luxury the nation could no longer afford. Lloyd George, the veteran director of World War I, now made it his business, and none too feelingly, to sever Churchill from Chamberlain, and showed himself far from averse to a bit of butchery in the process.

The Norwegian campaign rapidly went from bad to worse and as it did so the basic disastrousness of Chamberlain’s war leadership escaped from the Press and parliamentary ‘respect’. Still thinking in personal terms, he saw this as ingratitude, even as insolence. He faced up to the icy criticism and the mounting dislike with dignity. The dark, bright eyes in the exhausted face flashed challengingly at the constant abuse. His own integrity he knew to be inviolable and that was all that mattered in any prime minister. Even his enemies granted him integrity and because of it they might have done their best to deprive him of power considerately as well as constitutionally. But in the mid-spring of 1940, with the new barbarism at the gates, there was no time for niceties. The sinewy old man was hustled along by the uproar of events until, on May 7th, the showdown was enforced by the Commons in one of the greatest debates in its history.

*

The House was packed. Barry’s fine chamber which had just a year to go before the Luftwaffe destroyed it on May 10th, 1941, had never witnessed a more dramatic occasion. The sense of great theatre could not be separated from what was about to take place and even before Neville Chamberlain rose, at 3.48, the atmosphere was unbearably tense. The Peers’ Gallery was crowded and the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery contained the massed ambassadors and ministers of the United States, Russia, China, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Egypt and many other nations. Chamberlain made a quiet grey entrance and was accorded a ritual cheer from his own backbenchers. The normality of this barely had time to reach him before it was drowned in catcalls. ‘The man who missed the bus!’ and ‘Resign!’ were howled in his ears. The intensity of the attack appeared to rock him, as though he had received a physical blow, then a disdainful strength reasserted itself and he came bravely on. Looking shocked but far from frightened, he began to speak, his own anger and the anger of the House feeding on each other, so that the big Gothic room became suffocating with latent tumult.

He praised the courage of the soldiers, sailors and airmen in Norway as they retreated from position to position.

‘No doubt the news of our withdrawal from Southern Norway created a profound shock both in this House and in the country,’ he said. ‘And abroad,’ reminded somebody sharply. ‘All over the world,’ cried another voice. He tried to continue but his words were lost in the baying of, ‘They missed the bus, they missed the bus!’ The Speaker was furious and said he would not allow it, and this brought a mocking silence. This silence grew crippling as Chamberlain’s words ran into a querulous spate of self-justification and even self-pity. The disappointment of the Norway campaign unconsciously took second place to the Prime Minister’s personal disappointment. He tested the apparently shamed-into-docility mood of the House by reminding it haughtily that the Debate was a concession. This didn’t please the House at all. He went on, bleakly, ‘We cannot help it, but in this Debate we are giving hostages to fortune. Our military advisers have told us in very solemn terms of the dangers of holding such a discussion …’ and when he summed up legitimate criticism as bickering he guaranteed that the backs of his enemies would be arched to the greatest extent of their spite. His speech ended in an earnest appeal for co-operation. He sat down looking thin and ill and burning-eyed.

The next speech, delivered by Clement Attlee in a flat, rather yapping tone, was coldly destructive. There was actual cruelty in the way he made the events of the present grow out of the mistakes of the past. His presentation was remorseless.

‘It is not Norway alone. Norway comes as the culmination of many other discontents. People are saying that those mainly responsible for the conduct of affairs are men who have had an almost uninterrupted career of failure. Norway follows Czechoslovakia and Poland. Everywhere the story is “Too Late”. The Prime Minister talked about missing buses. What about the buses he and his associates have missed since 1931? They missed all the peace buses and caught the war bus. The people find that these men who have been consistently wrong in their judgement of events, the same people who thought that Hitler would not attack Czechoslovakia, who thought that Hitler could be appeased, seem not to have realized that Hitler would attack Norway. They see everywhere a failure of grip, a failure to drive….’

And then, the dry voice now positively arid with feeling, ‘… we cannot afford to have our destinies in the hands of failures or men who need a rest. They have allowed their loyalty to the Chief Whip to overcome their loyalty to the real needs of the country.’

The tone was thus set. The great debate was as yet in its opening stages but the level of execration was already high and would require thought and skill if it was to be maintained. Normal inter-party sniping was out-classed and the tired old man who was Prime Minister and whose death was so near braced himself for the inhumanity of it. The fake calm of the winter had allowed him to steal away to Chequers and immerse himself in Flaubert and Shakespeare’s comedies, and to embellish his dream of peace further. He listened to Sir Archibald Sinclair thrashing the Government as though it were some kind of loathsome monster instead of the little group of decent men he had watched taking its place on the Front Bench for years, and he could not understand it. Following Sinclair, Sir Henry Croft, in an indignant attempt to restore Chamberlain’s cracked image to its honourable true-blue state, made the fatal mistake of attacking the Press for its gloomy exaggerations. He attempted to reduce the Norway débâcle to a conventional military reverse. He refused to see that it was a lightning victory by the Nazis which had, only four short weeks after the arrival of the fifteen hundred men in Oslo, infected the entire climate of democracy. It took Colonel Wedgwood to eliminate this kind of ‘facile optimism’, as he called it. His words missed his audience’s heart and went straight to the pit of its stomach.

‘For myself, I think that the country is in greater danger than ever it has been before in my life; and, at such a time, I am not prepared to bother about who is to blame for anything … the Fleet can save us from starvation … it cannot save us from invasion. Has the Government not yet prepared any plans to combat the invasion of this country?’

These words were the first to be heard on such an unmentionable, unthinkable, though probable event. They drew everybody together as Colonel Wedgwood continued with, ‘We are living in a new world, and this is a new war, the end of which may be the utter destruction of the British people.’ Chamberlain listened, appreciating the ‘new war’ but quite uncomprehending the ‘new world’. He seemed to be visibly shrinking; the morning clothes and gleaming collar were a cast keeping his fragile body in some kind of decent shape for its ordeal.

A good British divertissement was then caused by the astonishing and not unalarming sign of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes bearing down on the House in the full-dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet. Blinded and agog, it heard him indict the Chamberlain régime in what was a tour de force of accusation. Salvo after salvo blasted the Government, bringing its feeble rigging down in festoons. The Norway excuses were blown to smithereens. The House heard him with more than one kind of amazement. How had such a famously bad speaker grown so undeniably eloquent? Sir Roger, who knew his limitations, had been very depressed that his awkward oratory would destroy the force of what he had to say. But after having sought Harold Macmillan’s advice he had written out his speech in full and rehearsed it thoroughly. What the House was hearing was a superb recitation, a brilliant party-piece. He said that Norway was a little Gallipoli and this analogy let him arrive at the real point of why he was making a speech at all. Medals and lace blazing, he turned to the Government Bench where, silent up to now, except where a Naval question had required a formal departmental answer, sat Winston Churchill. Glaring at him, Sir Roger said in a distinctly challenging voice, ‘I have great admiration and affection for my right hon. Friend the First Lord of the Admiralty. I am longing to see proper use made of his abilities. I cannot believe that it will be done under the existing system. The war cannot be won by committees….’

The Debate was now racing towards its gruesome climax and at three minutes past eight, after nearly four and a half hours of denunciation against which the Government’s passionless defence had proved useless, Leo Amery rose to his feet to administer the coup de grâce with a blunt Cromwellian sword. His action had all the careful premeditation of a dagger-thrust by an inspired assassin, and he had been preparing for the kill ever since he heard Chamberlain addressing the 1922 Committee the previous November. Two hundred Conservatives had gathered on that occasion, all of them aching to have their chief, for whom they had the famous Tory affection, freed once and for all from the moral slime of Munich. They waited eagerly to hear him wipe the Party and himself clean of the sneers and smears of appeasement. But, as Amery was to confess to his diary, all they got was ‘a city councillor’s speech’. There followed the dismissal of Hore-Belisha. By April a number of Tories were so worried by the sheer nervelessness of their Government that they took the unprecedented step of setting up a ‘watching committee’ under the chairmanship of Lord Salisbury. Such a cabal should have shown Chamberlain which way the wind was blowing. When the great Debate became inevitable, so did the Tory revolt.

When Leo Amery rose to make one of the most famous speeches ever heard in Parliament the House was nearly empty. Only ten or twelve members still occupied their seats. Everybody else had gone off to look for food or to join friends in the Library to release the tensions of the day in talk. Amery was so depressed by this that he nearly decided to put off the crucial part of his speech until the following day, but Clement Davies, realizing that such a plan might fracture the extraordinary momentum which alone could topple Chamberlain from his perch to which he seemed stuck fast with righteous quicklime, persuaded Amery to go ahead. While Amery stalled for time, Davies hurried out of the chamber to collect an audience. It was like a conspiracy. Members returned to their places in dribs and drabs. Then, with a sixth sense that something unique was about to occur, they came thronging back. All the time, Amery was speaking and speaking well, but still not saying anything which justified the arrested air. When he reached the bitter essence of his speech the House was massed around him.

There are few sights more quelling—a cannibal banquet, perhaps—than one Tory slaying a fellow Tory for the good of the country in the parliamentary arena at Westminster. Against such fury the rage of the Opposition is the cooing of doves. There had obviously existed a hope that Chamberlainism might be tactfully and painlessly sloughed, but when it became clear that flaying alone would rid the Party of it, there was no hesitation in wielding the knife. Amery could not be expected to enjoy such an operation. Unlike Churchill or even Eden, he had been closely connected with Chamberlain all through the thirties, though he had been among the first, when war became inevitable, to ignore the sanctity of the Whip. ‘Speak for England!’ he had shouted as Chamberlain rose to tell the House that Hitler had attacked Poland, and at that time Chamberlain had. But on September 3rd and all too frequently afterwards he had spoken for himself under the illusion that he was England. His genuine grief and sensitivity made these utterances acceptable for a time. Some day, somehow, there must be victory. Morality ordained it.

Amery could not accept this. ‘This afternoon, as a few days ago, the Prime Minister gave us a reasoned, argumentative case for our failure. Making a case and winning a war are not the same thing. Wars are won, not by explanations after the event, but by foresight, by clear decision and swift action.’

Then, stage by stage, Amery went over the calamitous Norway landings to expose to view the country’s excellent land and sea forces being hobbled time and time again from taking full, leading strides against the enemy by the policy of the Government. The House listened in deep silence.

‘We cannot go on as we are,’ said Amery at last, and this the House interpreted as a plea by the speaker that when the moment came it was to show no mercy. Those who counted England first and Chamberlain second must turn down their thumbs. ‘There must be a change in the system and the structure of our government machine. This is war, not peace. The essence of peace-time democratic government is discussion, conference and agreement; the Cabinet is in a sense a miniature Parliament. The main aim is agreement … to secure … to compromise, to postpone, to discuss. Under those conditions there are no far-reaching plans for sudden action. It is a good thing to let policies develop as you go along and get people educated by circumstances. That may be or may not be ideal in peace. It is impossible in war. In war the first essential is planning ahead. The next essential is swift, decisive action. We can wage war only on military principles. One of the first of these principles is the clear definition of individual responsibilities—not party responsibilities or Cabinet responsibilities … and the proper delegation of authority….’

And so on and so on. It struck at the pathetic uselessness of the ‘our brave lads’ approach. It ruled out of order ‘my disappointment’ and all those trudging ‘steps’ which His Majesty’s Government were for ever on the verge of taking. Chamberlain was not present to hear the axes eating into his plinth, he had other engagements to fill. Sir Edward Spears likened Amery’s relentless attack to volleys fired into sandbags.

The culmination of the speech which destroyed the Government was high theatre. Amery, a squashed little man with the minimum of presence, suddenly seemed, to the hallucinated eyes and strung-up nerves of the House, to loom over Parliament like a monolith. There was a moment of hesitation on his part and a suggestion of unbearable strain on the part of everybody present. He was afraid of overdoing it and they were afraid that some fatal last minute injection of gentlemanliness might prevent him from doing it at all. In his autobiography he wrote, ‘… I could only dare to go as far as I carried the House with me. To go beyond the sense of the House … would be not only a fatal anti-climax, but a fatal error of judgement. I was not out for a dramatic finish, but for a practical purpose; to bring down the Government if I could.’ He achieved both.

Suddenly irrevocably committed and wholly assured, he declaimed  the terrible words with which Oliver Cromwell dismissed the Long Parliament.

‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, Go!’

There were further speeches that evening—nearly three more hours of them—but those which continued to defend the Government were pallid, as suited apologiae for a corpse. At about half-past eleven M.P.s went home through the blacked-out streets above which the searchlights fingered the stars.

*

Officially, the Debate was but a third over. It was a tragedy in three acts. The next day, 8 May, saw the excited and exultant atmosphere of the previous evening reduced to one of nervous consternation. The small hours of the night had brought home to everybody the terrible crisis which faced the country and the not unenjoyable turbulence of the previous day had given place to a huge restless disquiet as members crushed into their places on the benches until the House was packed almost to suffocation.

Nothing could have been more ironical than the Speaker’s first duty, which was to announce the death of George Lansbury, although, in the tributes which followed, many people were able to rid themselves with decency of the remnants of their pacifism, throwing them gracefully into the grave of this peaceful old man. Private Business and Oral Answers followed in tantalizing normality. The Youth League of Sierra Leone, sugar, excursions to Holland, a dance band’s contract with the B.B.C.—it could hardly have been more inconsequential if it had been devised by a satirist for Punch. The Speaker seemed to go out of his way to lend all the pomp he could to these preliminaries. While Rome burned he made Ellen Wilkinson re-phrase a too tartly put question. When Mr. Pethick-Lawrence asked why preference was to be given to unmarried men under forty for jobs as assistant potato inspectors there could only be a glazed respect for the monstrous imperturbability of the Commons and, with elbows and knees jammed into each other like players in a vast pin-striped scrum, its members listened politely.

It was particularly dreadful for Neville Chamberlain—almost like conducting a quiz programme from the scaffold. He replied gamely when he had to. He looked more shrunken than ever and his thin throat was now no more than a straggling collection of veins which did not look as if they had strength enough to support the restless head.

A trifle after four o’clock Herbert Morrison rose to continue what he described as ‘an exceptionally grave and important debate’. He was tough but guarded. Obviously the Tories could not be turned out en masse as in normal times. The Government had to be discredited—was discredited—but Winston was part of the Government. The baby must not disappear with the bath-water. ‘I will sing the praises of anybody who is instrumental in winning the war,’ he declared. This indicated that there were to be exceptions but if the baby, square and glowering, heard, then he showed no sign. He sat perfectly still among the disgraced men who he alone seemed to remember were still his colleagues. Morrison went on to quote damagingly from a speech by Chamberlain which had got itself printed in the Listener only two days before.

When members burst into laughter, Morrison was sharp. The quotation had not been selected for their amusement, he scolded. It was an illustration of the delusion which gripped the Government. Soon he was to heap his stony tribute on the pile of indictment, taking care, as was observed by everybody, not to bruise Winston.

‘… is it the case that the right hon. Gentleman the First Lord of the Admiralty is being used as a sort of shield by the Prime Minister when he finds it convenient to do so? I am quite aware that the Prime Minister has great confidence in the First Lord…. But it appears to me that when the Government are in trouble … they tend to bring the First Lord into the shop window….’

Churchill heard this with intense distaste. The rope ladders from the band-waggon were dangling about his ears and it was obvious that he was expected to scramble aboard gratefully. He made no move, said nothing, but was noticeably engrossed in the stupendous implications of the emerging situation.

It was in the few sentences he spoke after Herbert Morrison’s demand for a vote of confidence that the Prime Minister made his worst mistake of the entire Debate. The weeks of mockery in the Press and the unprecedented attack of the last few hours had goaded him to a state of bewilderment.

‘I accept the challenge!’ he cried petulantly. ‘I welcome it, indeed! At least we shall see who is with us and who is against us, and I will call on my friends to support us in the Lobby tonight.’

A single second’s thought, and this gaffe might have been bitten back. But broken hearts and smarting eyes have little use for prudence. Only feeling remains. No one in the House that day was to give a damn for feeling. There was ‘feeling’, presumably, in the image of iced-up wings melting in the golden light of victory, but what else was there? The House was ruthless. It fell on the ‘friends in the Lobby’ phrase grimly, like a sleuth on a slip of the tongue. There were to be no concessions for nervous fatigue, age or even decency. All that mattered was to crush narrow Party loyalties. Speaker after speaker seized on the unfortunate phrase and it boomeranged back on to the patchy white head of the Prime Minister time and time again.

Lloyd George made a profound impression. The old war director of 1917 had broken his retirement to be present and was one of the few men in the House who did not seem overawed by the ponderous events. The world, he suggested, hadn’t come to an end—yet. He was derisive about the Norway strategy and silenced a Government supporter with, ‘You will have to listen to it, either now or later on. Hitler does not hold himself answerable to the Whips or to the Patronage Secretary.’ He grew inexorable, and the House cringed under the sourness of the truth.

‘We promised Poland: we promised Czechoslovakia. We said, “We will defend your frontiers if you will revise them”. There was a promise to Poland, to Norway, and to Finland. Our promissory notes are now rubbish on the market.’ On and on he swept but when he, too, held out a helping hand to Churchill with, ‘I do not think that the First Lord was entirely responsible for all the things that happened there [in Norway]’, it was brushed away in no uncertain terms.

‘I take complete responsibility for everything that has been done by the Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden,’ growled Churchill. It was a warning to any other Chamberlain-slayer who felt like patting the First Lord on the back with his knife-free hand. But it didn’t worry Lloyd George in the least.

‘The right hon. Gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues,’ he said, not at all abashed. This, too, was a guide to the House on how to deal with Winston. Chamberlain’s party loyalty was to be grabbed at and thrown back in his face, even when it was no more than a slip of the tongue. Winston’s was to be ignored even when he meant it. Lloyd George ended his speech with the cruel advice, ‘I say solemnly that the Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice, because there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.’

A lot of skirmishing followed this. Aneurin Bevan wigged the Deputy Speaker for his partiality and a Mr. Lambert reminded Lloyd George that he had walked behind him into St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on Armistice Day, 1918, and heard him declare before God and the congregation present that ‘This is the war to end all wars’. Mr. Lambert then went on to deplore the beastliness of the debate and to praise his friend, the Prime Minister, to whom everybody was offering violence. Why, he said, ‘I listened in the early days of the war to a gentleman named Lord Haw-Haw. He tried to sap our confidence. That is what is happening today. Dr. Goebbels could not have done better than the House of Commons has done.’

At 6.34 Sir Stafford Cripps rose and began to say something about the previous speaker’s case for maintaining the present Government in office, when he was interrupted by Mr. Lambert with, ‘It was the other way about. I have asked you to come in’.

‘He has asked,’ amended Sir Stafford bleakly, ‘that the Government, substantially under the same leadership, should have certain accretions, that the Mad Hatter’s tea-party should have another session, and he fails to realize that you cannot identify the leadership of a particular government with the interest of the country. He takes the view apparently that it is better that the leadership should remain … intact, whatever its effect may be upon the chances of victory….’ And then, in sentences which mounted until they reached a flood-tide of obloquy, he attacked Chamberlain, ending with, ‘I never thought that I should be present in the House of Commons when in a moment so grave a Prime Minister would appeal on personal grounds and personal friendship to the loyalty of the House of Commons. I trust that those revealing sentences which he spoke will show that he is unfit to carry on the government of the country.’

For Duff Cooper this was all a great personal vindication of a very different kind, but he forebore to crow. He, too, made Agag-like circumlocutions round the brooding First Lord. A patriot of the classical kind, he showed real anger with the timidity which was, with every likelihood, about to cost the country its freedom.

Chamberlain’s friends now began to thrust out their helping hands too wildly, with the result that the Prime Minister was pushed further and further into the mire. Sir George Courthorpe’s ‘help’, for instance was a case in point. ‘Thank God, we are led by a Prime Minister who is not easily rattled!’ cried Sir George. And Mr. Brooke went so far as to see in the sorrowful crumpled figure on the Government Bench ‘a cool judgement and a fiery hatred’. One would have needed to have been a saint to accept such tributes in the spirit in which they were given.

A little past nine o’clock A. V. Alexander began to speak, gently working his way towards the delicate problem of Winston Churchill. Members listened to him with hearts in their mouths, as though he was walking across a minefield. He had heard Churchill speaking at Manchester as long back as January. He had heard him implore the country not to be taken in by the phoney war and to turn to self-sacrifice. ‘There is not a week, not a day, not an hour to be lost!’ Churchill had said. It made no sense at all then. Alexander was half-way through his speech when Churchill, who had presumably left the chamber to eat his dinner, returned to hear a whole string of questions about the Navy’s part in the Norway failure.

Alexander’s speech took over an hour and it was well past ten when Churchill rose to wind up the Debate in a slaughterhouse atmosphere of murdered reputations, glassy eyes, flayed dignity, wounded susceptibilities, bleeding hearts, butcher’s ferocity and crushed careers. Nothing so Tudor had been seen at Westminster for centuries, no scene was less inviting. But it was no time to show fastidiousness. In marked contrast to the political carnage all around him, Churchill was singularly unscratched. Not only not tired, but bright and fresh. Not swayed by all that had gone before, but calmly in control of himself. At first he spoke moderately—almost casually. He put a few people in their places with jolts which made them appreciate the difference between legitimate criticism and hot air. Mr. Alexander had asked him about twenty questions; he would answer the principal ones. When Sir Roger Keyes dared to interrupt he replied, ‘I am sure that my hon. and gallant Friend is always accurate … but that is not the point I am discussing now.’ He did all he could to salvage the Chamberlain Government from its disaster, taking on himself every bit of responsibility possible. He was witty about the popular reporting from Norway—‘In the brown hours, when baffling news comes, and disappointing news, I always turn for refreshment to the reports on the German wireless.’ And, when at last he wound up with a not very virulent denunciation of Labour for forcing a division, the House divided, most of it exultant again, but cautiously so.

The division itself was a kind of political fratricide and even the moral certainty behind their actions could not conceal the outward shame of those Conservatives who found themselves in the Opposition Lobby. Shifty eyes and blushes met the Labour and Liberal grins. But the choice was sticking by the old man who, God knew, meant well, or the survival of democracy. When the figures were announced, and the Government’s usual majority of 200 was reduced to 81 there was bedlam. The Speaker’s voice was drowned in shouts of ‘Resign! Resign!’ It was a war-cry, the first ever heard since September 3rd. Chamberlain heard it and looked transfigured by it. As the hurly-burly subsided they watched him stiffen, rise, turn and make his way out of the House. His movements and his appearance were tragic and considered, as though he was remembering who he was and how he usually acted as he strolled out of the Commons. He was not humiliated by the exposure of his weakness. He knew no weakness. He was stunned by what he saw as an incomprehensible treachery and it was to face the blow of this that a mask of aloofness and pride settled over his features. He left behind him much true pity but no remorse.

The next day he invited Attlee and Greenwood to Downing Street and asked them to join him in the construction of a National Government and a few hours later he received the answer. Labour would serve in a National Government, but not his National Government. He had expected this and long before the Socialist reply came back he had given Churchill’s name to the King. That evening he made his farewell broadcast in a brave, dull little talk which flopped plaintively into clichés nobody could object to. Fine language was for others to concern themselves with now.

The speech barely held its own amongst the deafening news which shook the world on May 10th. Hitler had invaded Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. Belief in one’s self begins as a venture and ends as a habit, and on the very morning that the German avalanche rolled across the Low Countries, Neville Chamberlain had sufficiently recovered from his parliamentary mauling to make a last attempt to retain power, and was only persuaded not to think of such a thing by Sir Kingsley Wood. There followed an intensely polite little scene in which Halifax and Churchill waited for the Prime Minister to choose between them. Halifax settled the matter by withdrawing on the grounds that as a peer it would be difficult for him to keep in touch with the Commons.

And so, at six o’clock on May 10th, 1940, Winston Churchill drove the short journey from the Admiralty to the Palace and, ‘acquired the chief power2 in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs’.

Thus ended the week of the great Debate, the week a world died and a world was born. The birth pangs were terrifying. Brussels was bombed, Rotterdam was set in flames, as the Blitzkreig shook Western Europe. Roosevelt lashed isolationism and the United States battle fleet massed at Hawaii. In the Low Countries, the B.E.F. raced to meet the German armies and to endure the victory-in-defeat of Dunkirk—now less than three weeks away. When the Commons met again, on Monday 13th, it was to hear Churchill, who now seemed to have been in power for years for so much had happened in so few short hours, rasping his De Profundis.

‘I would say to the House, as I have said to those who have joined this Government, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war…. You ask, what is our aim? … it is victory”.’

Notes

1 Chapter 15 (passim). Extracts are quoted from Hansard.

2 ‘[I] acquired the chief power …’ is from The Gathering Storm by Sir Winston Churchill (Cassell, 1948).