FOUR

VORTEX

 

ON the Saturday before Parliament’s Munich debate, Winston was at Chartwell, vigorously slapping bricks into place and awaiting a visitor, a twenty-six-year-old BBC producer, unknown then but destined to become infamous in the early 1950s. He was Guy Burgess, who with Kim Philby and Donald Maclean—all three upper class, all Cambridge men—would be cleared to review the U.S. government’s most sensitive documents, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s daily traffic and dispatches from Korea. In fact they would be Soviet intelligence agents. Burgess’s notoriety lay far in the future that sunbright morning, however, when Churchill, in a blue boilersuit (a forerunner of his wartime “siren suit”), left his bricks to greet his visitor, a trowel still in one hand. The meeting was purposeless; Winston had been scheduled to give BBC listeners a half-hour talk on the Mediterranean, but when the Czech crisis erupted he had asked that the program be canceled. Burgess was keen to meet him anyhow, however, and Churchill, feeling that was the least he could do, had agreed.

In the beginning he was gruff. He complained, Burgess recollected afterward, that he had been “very badly treated in the matter of political broadcasts and that he was always muzzled by the BBC…. He went on to say that he would be even more muzzled in the future, since the BBC seemed to have passed under the control of the Government.” According to Burgess, Winston said he had just received a message from Beneš—he always called him “Herr Beans”—asking for his “advice and assistance.” But, he asked, “what answer shall I give?—for answer I shall and must…. Here am I, an old man without power and without party. What advice can I give, what assistance can I proffer?” Burgess stammered that he could offer his eloquence. Pleased, Winston said: “My eloquence! Ah, yes… that Herr Beans can rely on in full and indeed”—he paused and winked—“some would say in overbounding measure. That I can offer him. But what else, Mr. Burgess, what else can I offer him?” Burgess, usually garrulous, was tongue-tied. Moment succeeded moment, but he could think of nothing to say. He saw a great man, the scourge of fascism, caged by frustration. Then Churchill spoke. “You are silent, Mr. Burgess. You are rightly silent. What else can I offer Herr Beans? Only one thing: my only son, Randolph, who is already training to be an officer.”¹

Throughout 1938 Churchill’s warnings had grown more and more persistent, and less and less effective. His mots were seldom passed along now because his targets, the “Men of Munich,” as Fleet Street called them, were believed to have prevented a general European war. In almost any gathering, it would have been indiscreet to remark: “Have you heard what Winston says about Neville? ‘In the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender.’ ” Or: “Churchill says the Government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war, too.” Yet some hit home. Malcolm MacDonald, son of Ramsay and minister for the colonies and Dominions under Chamberlain, recalls with discomfort but also amusement how, during a speech on the future of Palestine, he was moved to say that “I cannot remember a time when I was not told stories of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Prince of Peace.” And as he paused for breath Churchill muttered: “I always thought he was born in Birmingham.”²

At 3:34 P.M. on Monday, October 3, 1938, Parliament opened its debate on the Munich Agreement. In the observance of custom, Duff Cooper, as a resigning minister, spoke first. “The Prime Minister,” he said, “has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist…. We have taken away the defences of Czechoslovakia in the same breath as we have guaranteed them, as though you were to deal a man a mortal blow and at the same time insure his life.”

Chamberlain, he noted, attached “considerable importance” to the document he and Hitler had signed at Munich. “But,” he asked, “what do those words mean? Do they mean that Herr Hitler will take ‘no’ for an answer? He has never taken it yet. Or do they mean that he believes that he will get away with this, as he has got away with everything else, without fighting, by well-timed bluff, bluster and blackmail? Otherwise it means very little.” Duff Cooper ended: “I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter. I have retained something which is to me of great value. I can still walk about the world with my head erect.”³

The House was deeply moved by Cooper’s resignation speech. Antony Winn, the Times lobby correspondent, reported that it had been well received. Dawson, who hadn’t been there, tore up Winn’s piece and wrote an account of his own, dismissing the speech as “a damp squib,” and headed the story “From our lobby correspondent.” Winn resigned.⁴

The prime minister, following Duff Cooper, paid ritualistic tribute to him and ignored his arguments. Chamberlain had already set forth his own views to the cabinet earlier in the day, and the kindest interpretation of his position is that he had forgotten he was prime minister and thought himself once more watchdog of the Treasury. Ever since his stewardship as chancellor of the Exchequer, he had told the cabinet, he had been haunted by the possibility that “the burden of armaments might break our backs.” Therefore he had sought “to resolve the causes… responsible for the armaments race.” Now, after his agreement with the German führer, England was in “a more hopeful position.” The next steps would be further agreements “which would stop the arms race.” The effort to strengthen the country’s defenses should proceed, but that was “not the same thing as to say that as a thank offering for the present détente we should at once embark on a great increase in our armaments programme.” His goal, he now told the House, had been “to work for the pacification of Europe, for the removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air. The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles.” Czechoslovakia had been “the latest and perhaps the most dangerous” of these obstacles, but “now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.”⁵

The House did not hear him in silence. When he spoke proudly of the release by the Czechs of Sudetendeutsche prisoners, one MP called: “What about the kidnapped Czechs?” When he spoke of his “profound feeling of sympathy” for Czechoslovakia, several members cried, “Shame!” He replied: “I have done nothing to be ashamed of. Let those who have, hang their heads. We must feel profound sympathy for a small and gallant nation in the hour of their national grief and loss.” A backbencher interrupted him: “It is an insult to say it.” He told the House that “the real triumph” of Munich “is that it has shown that representatives of four great Powers can find it possible to agree on a way of carrying out a difficult and delicate operation by discussion instead of by force of arms, and thereby they have averted a catastrophe which would have ended civilisation as we have known it.”⁶

Watching the prime minister, Harold Nicolson thought: “He is obviously tired and irritable and the speech does not go down well. Then up gets Anthony Eden. I felt at first that he was not coming out strongly enough, but he was getting the House on his side before opening the attack. When it came, it was superb.” Eden doubted that “the events of the last few days… constitute the beginning of better things, as my right honorable friend [Chamberlain] hopes.” Instead, he believed, “they only give us a breathing space, perhaps of six months or less, before the next crisis is upon us.”⁷

Attlee, coming next, declared that they were “in the midst of a tragedy. We have felt humiliation. This has not been a victory for reason and humanity. It has been a victory for brute force.” Sinclair noted that the P.M. had called the Munich terms a victory for self-determination; it was, he said, “a plain travesty of self-determination,” because although the areas ceded were inhabited by “a substantial minority” of Germans, they were a minority, and many of them wanted no part of the Reich. The “irruption of German troops,” he predicted, accurately, “will sweep before them a whole crowd of refugees who certainly would have been in favour of remaining in those territories. There is no justice or self-determination about that.” Attacks on the settlement by Amery, Macmillan, and Bracken followed.⁸

Churchill sat, silent and immobile, for nearly three days of debate. He was scheduled to speak Wednesday after Sir John Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wound up for the government. Simon declared that Chamberlain would be vindicated by time: “It can only be for history to decide hereafter whether the things done in Munich the other day lead… to better things, or whether the prognostications of increasing evil will prove to be justified.” The crisis, he said, had been a splendid experience for the British people. Next time they would know precisely what to do. The Munich terms were “a vast improvement over the Godesberg Memorandum,” he insisted. Everyone in the chamber knew that was untrue, and he finally acknowledged that His Majesty’s Government was “deeply conscious today that while war has been avoided, Herr Hitler has again achieved the substance of his immediate and declared aim without declaring war.”⁹

It was 5:10 P.M. when the Speaker recognized Churchill, and as Winston rose the mood of the House resembled that of Spaniards when the bull lunges into the arena. Before he had spoken a dozen words the turmoil began, and because nothing he said was conciliatory, it continued throughout the forty-nine minutes of his speech, led by Nancy Astor’s cries of “Rude! Rude!” Sweeping the House with a hard stare, chin down, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, feet solidly planted far apart, he declared that he would begin by saying “the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing…. We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and… France has suffered even more than we have.” Nancy called out, “Nonsense,” and he whirled on her: “When the Noble Lady cries ‘Nonsense’ she could not have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer admit in his illuminating and comprehensive speech just now that… the utmost… the Prime Minister has been able to secure by all his immense exertions, by all the great efforts and mobilisation which took place in this country, and by all the anguish and strain through which we have passed in this country, the utmost he has been able to gain has been—” He was interrupted by cries of “Peace!” “… the utmost he has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.” He saw no point in distinguishing between the positions reached at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich. “They will be very simply epitomized, if the House will permit me to vary the metaphor. One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally, the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence and the rest in promises of good will for the future.” The terms Chamberlain had brought back with him could have been reached “through the ordinary diplomatic channels at any time during the summer. And I will say this, that I believe the Czechs, left to themselves and told they were going to get no help from the Western Powers, would have been able to make better terms than they have got.”

He reviewed Hitler’s successive aggressions and why all efforts to check him had failed: “There can never be absolute certainty that there will be a fight if one side is determined that it will give way completely.” He himself had “always held the view that the maintenance of peace depends upon the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor, coupled with a sincere effort to redress grievances.” France and Britain—“especially if they had maintained a close contact with Russia, which certainly was not done”—could have influenced the “smaller States of Europe, and I believe they could have determined the attitude of Poland.” Indeed, their impact would have been felt in the Reich, giving “strength to all that intense desire for peace which the helpless German masses share with their British and French fellow men, and which, as we have been reminded, found a passionate and rarely permitted vent in the joyous manifestations with which the Prime Minister was acclaimed in Europe.”

Alliances and deterrents “of Powers, great and small, ready to stand firm upon the front of law and for the ordered remedy of grievances… might well have been effective.” He did not “think it fair to charge those who wished to see this course followed, and followed consistently and resolutely, with having wished for immediate war. Between submission and immediate war there was this third alternative, which gave a hope not only of peace but of justice.” Naturally, for such a policy to succeed, Britain “should declare straight out and a long time beforehand that she would, with others, join to defend Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression. His Majesty’s Government refused to give that guarantee when it would have saved the situation, yet in the end they gave it when it was too late, and now, for the future, they renew it when they have not the slightest power to make it good.

All is over.

Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken,

Czechoslovakia recedes into darkness.

She has suffered in every respect

by her association with the Western democracies.

Plebiscites, he said, as defined in Hitler’s Munich office, could not “amount in the slightest degree to a verdict of self-determination. It is a fraud and a farce to invoke that name. We in this country, as in other liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian States who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds.” In any event “this particular block of land, this mass of human beings to be handed over, has never expressed the desire to go under Nazi rule. I do not believe that even now, if their opinion could be asked, they would exercise such an option.”

He asked: “What is the remaining position of Czechoslovakia? Not only are they politically mutilated, but, economically and financially, they are in complete confusion.” Their banking and railroad nets were “severed and broken, their industries are curtailed, and the movement of their population is most cruel.” He gave an example: “The Sudeten miners, who are all Czechs and whose families have lived in that area for centuries, must now flee into an area where there are hardly any mines left for them to work.” He doubted—prophetically—that “in future the Czechoslovak State” could be “maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed by the Nazi regime.”

As a true Conservative, Churchill sought guidance “in the wisdom of the past, for all wisdom is not new wisdom.” On holiday he had studied the reign of King Ethelred the Unready, and particularly “the rugged words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written a thousand years ago.” He quoted a sentence: “All these calamities fell upon us because of evil counsel, because tribute was not offered to them at the right time nor yet were they resisted; but when they had done the most evil, then was peace made with them.” So it was now: “We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. It must now be accepted that all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi Power.” The democracies’ loss of prestige, he told the House, beggared description. In Warsaw the British and French ambassadors sought to visit Colonel Józef Beck, Poland’s foreign minister. “The door was shut in their faces.” And what, he wondered, would be “the position of France and England this year and the year afterwards?” The German army probably outnumbered that of France now, “though not nearly so matured or perfected.” There were, he said, unexplored options; unfortunately, none were encouraging. But what he found “unendurable” was “the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure…. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands” which “may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty.” A “policy of submission” would entail “restrictions” upon freedom of speech and the press. “Indeed, I hear it said sometimes now that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians.”

He did not “grudge our loyal, brave people… the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief” when they learned that war was not imminent, “but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’

And do not suppose that this is the end.

This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

This is only the first sip—

the first foretaste of a bitter cup

which will be proffered to us year by year—

Unless—

by a supreme recovery of our moral health and martial vigour,

we arise again and take our stand for freedom,

as in the olden time.¹⁰

Lord Maugham called Churchill an “agitator” who should be “shot or hanged.” The Times reported that Churchill had “treated a crowded House to prophesies which made Jeremiah appear an optimist” and referred patronizingly to his “dismal sincerity.” His speech, according to the Daily Express, was “an alarmist oration by a man whose mind is soaked in the conquests of Marlborough,” and his failure to support the government “weakens his influence among members of the Conservative Party.” It did indeed; Robert Rhodes James notes that “the feeling against him in the party was now intense.”¹¹

Parliament was still dominated by the privileged classes and their dread of the Soviets, a fear which Hitler played like a Stradivarius, repeatedly citing as his principal aim “zur Bekämpfung des Bolschewismus” (“the fight against bolshevism”). But out beyond Westminster and Whitehall—in the Midlands, the mines, the Lake District; the tributaries of the Thames, Humber, and Severn; and the commercial cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Bristol—there, once the first flush of gratitude for peace had passed, Munich became more controversial. In the House of Commons, once the big guns of Chamberlain’s critics had ceased fire—Duff Cooper, Eden, and Churchill as anchor man—the debate would proceed languidly.

In humbler neighborhoods it was another story, now that Spain had taught rank-and-file workmen that fascism could not be stopped without bloodshed. This awareness was by no means confined to them. In Mayfair, Park Lane, and Bloomsbury, the wives of many Conservative MPs denounced their husbands’ support for Chamberlain’s appeasements.

These heated exchanges were not confined to the United Kingdom—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Britain was still the world’s sole superpower. The repercussions of decisions made in Whitehall and Downing Street were felt almost everywhere—throughout the Dominions and even in the United States, which was bumbling about, playing blindman’s buff with the twin games of pacifism and isolationism. Churchill afterward wrote: “Among the Conservatives, families and friends in intimate contact were divided by a degree the like of which I have never seen. Men and women, long bound by party ties, the social amenities, and family connections, glared at one another in scorn and anger.” His daughter Mary remembers: “Looking back, it is difficult to describe the feelings of anger, shame, and bitterness felt by those who opposed the Munich Agreement.” And Lady Diana Cooper recalled that “husbands and wives stopped speaking to one another, fathers and sons said unforgivable things to one another; it was as if the entire country was in labor, straining to give birth. And in a way it was.”¹²

Harold Macmillan believed that the new, proud Britain was two years in gestation and had been conceived in the summer of 1938, when dissident Tories, mostly young, began to form factions critical of the Chamberlain government. The followers of Leo Amery were stronger once he broke with HMG, but the most visible group was still Eden’s. Eden’s followers were pursued by the press; many of their leaders had distinguished themselves in the war, and they were commonly regarded as the next generation of ministers. Taken as a whole, however, they were altogether too civil, too respectful of their elders, too reluctant to take firm stands, and far too unimaginative to acquire the élan and vigor of successful Young Turks. They avoided offending the prime minister; they carefully disassociated themselves from Churchill and his tiny band; when Duncan Sandys expressed interest in attending one of their meetings, he was told that his presence was not required. In these weaknesses they reflected the flaws of their leader. Eden’s departure from the Foreign Office had been the political sensation of the season, but his resignation speech was so crafted to avoid affronting anyone that, as Macmillan noted, it “left Members somewhat uncertain as to what all the row was about.” At a Queen’s Hall rally protesting Munich, Eden’s discretion, according to Liddell Hart, irritated the audience, which grew restless. As he sat down, Violet Bonham Carter proposed the ritualistic vote of gratitude, but later she said she felt more like moving a vote of censure. Eden’s chief asset then was that he was neither Neville Chamberlain nor Winston Churchill.¹³

In retrospect it seems that once Britain had grasped the price Chamberlain paid for Hitler’s signature, the people should have turned to Churchill. In time they did, but public opinion is slow to coalesce, and as winter deepened and 1939 arrived, England vacillated. Certainly the average Briton was appalled by the Czech sellout. A poll taken after Godesberg showed that two out of every three Englishmen had disapproved of the Anglo-French proposals as too generous to Germany. Walking home on the evening of September 22, Duff Cooper had encountered a “vast procession… marching down Whitehall crying ‘Stand by the Czechs’ and ‘Chamberlain must go.’ ” Yet England was not ready for Churchill. Capitulation to Hitler was unpopular, but the revulsion against a renewal of trench warfare remained. Although Winston’s repeated calls for a defense buildup had been intended to avoid war, it was clear to all that, once committed, he would relish a good fight. As a Labour candidate had charged in 1923, he was “militant to the fingertips.” In the wake of Munich a House critic effectively quoted A. G. Gardiner’s comment made thirty years earlier: “Churchill will write his name in history; take care that he does not write it in blood.”¹⁴

Macmillan recalled that “Everyone knew that so great was the strength of the Government in the country that nothing could seriously shake them in Parliament. At our almost daily conferences with our friends, we had the gloomiest forebodings. The tide was, at present, too strong. It was flowing against us—especially Churchill.” Increasingly the dissidents’ meetings were furtive, almost conspiratorial. Nicolson confided to his wife that he had attended “a hush-hush meeting” of a dozen MPs, including Eden, Amery, Macmillan, Sidney Herbert, and Duff Cooper. They had “decided that we should not advertise ourselves as a group or even call ourselves a group.” It is difficult to understand what they hoped to accomplish; they would “merely meet together from time to time, exchange views, and organise ourselves for a revolt if needed.” But they were too timid and far too respectable to rebel; Nicolson characterized them as “all good Tories and sensible men. This group is distinct from the Churchill group…. I feel happier about this.”¹⁵

Part of Churchill’s particular alienation may be traced to his megalomania, a source of strength in public life but distasteful to many in private. Boothby remarked that “ ‘Thou shall have no other gods but me’ has always been the first, and the most significant, of his Commandments.” Desmond Morton wrote a journalist long afterward: “The full truth, I believe, is that Winston’s ‘friends’ must be persons who were of use to him. The idea of having a friend who was of no practical use to him, but being a friend because he liked him, had no place.” To be sure, Morton’s comment was made late in life, when he had become embittered because Churchill had not given him a more prominent role in the wartime government. But even Violet Bonham Carter, who adored Winston, conceded that “He demanded partisanship from a friend, or, at the worst, acquiescence.”¹⁶

However, that was not why parliamentarians who had come to share his views avoided him in the House. Churchill was considered dangerous. If an MP had ministerial ambitions, association with Winston could kill his chances, and what could be the point of that? Because Churchill always seemed confident, strong, and self-assured, it never occurred to them that he might welcome a pat on the back, or a few pleasant words commending him for a great speech, despite the editorials, despite the lord chancellor’s opinion that he should be introduced to a firing squad, or the noose of hemp, for having delivered it. The prime minister might notice, or hear of it. Since his acclamatory reception at the airport and at Downing Street, Chamberlain had acquired messianic airs.

On Thursday, the day after Churchill had spoken, the prime minister moved for an adjournment of the House until November 1. Attlee, Sinclair, and several Conservatives—Macmillan the most vehement of them—strongly protested. Churchill urged a two-day session in mid-October; it was “derogatory to Parliament,” he said, “that it should be thought unfit, as it were, to be attending to these grave matters, that it should be sent away upon a holiday in one of the most formidable periods through which we have lived.” Chamberlain replied shabbily that the Speaker decided when the House would be recalled, to which Winston instantly retorted: “But only on the advice of His Majesty’s Government.” Every MP knew that. Chamberlain called his remark “unworthy… tittle tattle,” and now it was between the two of them; Winston, desperately in need of support, got none. He wrote No. 10, protesting the prime minister’s slur, and the P.M. responded: “I am sorry if you think my remarks were offensive, but I must say that I think you are singularly sensitive for a man who so constantly attacks others. I considered your remarks highly offensive to me and to those with whom I have been working…. You cannot expect me to allow you to do all the hitting and never hit back.”¹⁷

Churchill returned to Chartwell profoundly depressed. He canceled a lecture at the Imperial Defence College, explaining, “I am so distressed by the change in the situation that I haven’t the heart to address myself to the task to which you invited me at present.” Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel, outraged by Munich, had resigned from the French cabinet, and Winston wrote Reynaud: “I cannot see what foreign policy is now open to the French Republic. No minor State will risk its future upon the guarantee of France. I am indulging in no pretensions upon our own account…. Can we make head against the Nazi domination, or ought we severally to make the best terms possible with it—while trying to rearm? Or is a common effort still possible?” His nephew John George Churchill later told Martin Gilbert: “The gloom after Munich was absolutely terrific. At Chartwell there were occasions just alone with him when the despondency was overwhelming.” To an old Canadian friend Winston wrote on October 11: “I am now greatly distressed, and for the time being staggered by the situation. Hitherto the peace-loving Powers have been definitely stronger than the Dictators, but next year we must expect a different balance.”¹⁸

He thought he had touched bottom when Edward abdicated, but this was worse. That, however, was part of this. In 1936, A. J. P. Taylor writes, “Churchill had seemed the rallying point for patriotic and democratic opinion,” but Winston’s ambiguous position on the Spanish Civil War and his championing of a discredited monarch eroded his support, and “his prestige ran downhill,” particularly on the left. The conventional explanation for his continued isolation is that he had outraged Parliament by his long losing battle for the Indian Raj; but Chamberlain had deplored the parliamentary maneuvers which led to dominion status for India. Labour approved of Winston’s support of the League of Nations but recoiled from his calls for collective security. He “estranged the idealists,” as Taylor puts it, “and so remained until the outbreak of war a solitary figure, distrusted by both sides.” After Britain’s disillusionment with Munich—and the “first ecstasy,” noted Muggeridge, “soon passed” when Englishmen realized that the agreement would “involve still further concessions to Germany”—reasonable men might at the very least have acknowledged that Churchill had been right. But politics is never reasonable. Having denied, ridiculed, and scorned his accusations and impeachments, the cabinet could not indemnify him without confessing to its own incompetence.¹⁹

As the last weeks of 1938 skulked away, anyone wagering that the member from Epping would still be in his corner seat a year hence would have been entitled to ask for odds. Two exits were available. He could quit, or his constituents could recall him. He had hung on for nine years, hoping for a responsible post, but the chances of that were as remote as ever. He was still urging the strengthening of Britain’s defenses, and that, in the eyes of the appeasers, was enough to disqualify him, despite his great abilities. Furthermore, as Chamberlain noted in his diary, recognition of Churchill was out of the question as long as friendship with Hitler and Mussolini seemed possible: “I wouldn’t risk it by what would certainly be regarded by them as a challenge.” Macmillan told Hugh Dalton that in Parliament or out, Churchill was “in danger of relapsing into a complacent Cassandra. He would say: ‘Well, I have done my best. I have made all these speeches. Nobody has paid any attention. All my prophecies have turned out to be true. I have been publicly snubbed by the Government. What more can I do?’ ”²⁰

In London it seemed inconceivable that Churchill could be forced to resign his seat in Parliament. But in the aftermath of Munich, during those weeks in which it seemed that Chamberlain had actually succeeded in buying peace, the rank and file of Conservative voters, proud of the party’s leader, were aroused by any criticism of him. In this political climate the Sunday Express ran a brief item under the head: “Trouble is being made for Churchill in Epping. The campaign is strong, the campaigners determined.” Winston sent Beaverbrook a note of protest; the story, he wrote, was “misleading as to the true state of affairs: & certainly most unhelpful to me.” It was unhelpful, but it was also accurate. Two of his loyal constituents, Sir Harry Goschen and Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, had been dismayed by his Munich speech. Goschen wrote to the chairman of the Epping Conservative Association, Sir James Hawkey, that he could not “help thinking it was rather a pity that he broke up the harmony of the House by the speech he made…. I think it would have been a great deal better if he had kept quiet and not made a speech at all.”²¹

Goschen decided to stick with Churchill; but Thornton-Kemsley wanted him repudiated and replaced by someone who would “support the Conservative administration, not… discredit them.” On November 4, in a public meeting, Churchill defended his position on Munich. Then Thornton-Kemsley spoke, arguing that Winston’s attempts to contain Germany with a “ring of strongly armed powers” had floundered. There was, he said, no conflict between British and German goals, and if the four nations represented at Munich could “agree upon a policy of friendship,” no other nation would dare touch off a war. The audience seemed equally divided, but Hawkey lent his support to Winston, and his constituents passed a resolution regretting the failure of His Majesty’s Government to respond to their member’s warnings “given during the last five years” and declaring that had the prime minister and his cabinet followed Churchill’s advice, Chamberlain “would have found himself in a far better position to negotiate with the heads of the dictator States.”²²

Churchill was once more secure in Epping—or so it seemed in November 1938—but as Sarah later wrote him: “What price politics since they won’t listen to you?” The one who listened least was the one who mattered most.²³

Neville Chamberlain believed that Munich was the triumph of his career. Intolerant of dissent, a believer in strong party discipline, he was vain, rude, and vindictive. These unattractive traits were balanced by terrific energy, a powerful intellect, and an even stronger gift for command. William Strang, of the Foreign Office, who was outraged by the Munich settlement, nevertheless saw him as “a man of cool, calm mind, strong will, decisive purpose, wholly devoted to the public cause and with a firm confidence in his own judgment.”²⁴

If he had a sense of humor, it is unrecorded. In any event, he did not think public business and national institutions subject to levity. He had detested Rugby as much as Winston had Harrow; nevertheless, he believed that public schools were part of the social order and should not be mocked. When Churchill told the House that “Britain is like a Laocoön strangled by old school ties” and compared England’s public school system to “feeding sham pearls to real swine,” Neville scowled. An incapacity for the droll and the whimsical is typical of fanatics—and the prime minister now resembled a skipper who has set his bearing and lashed himself to the wheel. After Munich he should have given England’s security overriding priority, but on Christmas Day, 1938, Oliver Harvey, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, noted despondently in his diary that Chamberlain was not pressing on with rearmament, that under Inskip the Committee of Imperial Defence “goes slower and slower,” and that “Inskip must certainly go. A much more vigorous and imaginative man should be there. Winston is the obvious man, but I believe the PM would rather die than have him.”²⁵

That much seemed clear. In November, addressing the House of Commons from the front bench, the P.M. had scorned Winston, repeating the old accusation of Churchillian instability. It was the same old wine from the same dirty bottles, but no one could remember a British prime minister turning on one of his own party’s private members. It simply wasn’t done. And it was particularly unwise to do it to Churchill, as Chamberlain learned when Winston, speaking to 1,200 of his constituents in Chingford on December 9, noted that the P.M. had told Parliament “that where I failed, for all my brilliant gifts, was in the faculty of judging. I will gladly submit my judgement about foreign affairs and national defence during the last five years in comparison to his own.”²⁶

It was a devastating speech. In 1934, he recalled, Chamberlain had been chancellor of the Exchequer when Winston warned Stanley Baldwin that “the Germans had a secret Air Force and were rapidly overhauling ours. I gave definite figures and forecasts. Of course, it was all denied with all the weight of official authority.” He had been derided as a “scaremonger.” In less than six months, he reminded his audience, Baldwin “had to come down to the House and admit he was wrong and he said, ‘We are all to blame.’ ” Baldwin had “got more applause for making this mistake, which may prove fatal to the British Empire and to British freedom,” than most Englishmen who rendered a great service to the nation. “Mr Chamberlain was, next to Mr Baldwin, the most powerful Member of that Government…. He knew all the facts. His judgement failed just like that of Mr Baldwin and we are suffering from the consequences of it today.” That blunder had been only the beginning. A year later Winston had asked that the RAF be doubled and redoubled, which prompted Lord Samuel, who shared Chamberlain’s faith in appeasement, to say he thought “my judgement so defective that he likened me to a Malay running amok. It would have been well for him and his persecuted race if my advice had been taken. They would not be where they are now.”

He then turned to Chamberlain’s record as prime minister over the past two years. In his early days at No. 10 “the Prime Minister made a heart-to-heart settlement with Mr de Valera, and gave up to him those fortified ports on the South Coast of Ireland which are vital to our food supply in time of war.” The P.M. led Englishmen to believe that “the country now called Eire were reconciled to us in friendship, but I warned him with my defective judgement that if we got into any great danger Mr de Valera would demand the surrender of Ulster as the price of any friendship or aid.” And this, he said, “fell out exactly.” Recently De Valera had announced that he could give England neither friendship nor aid while any British troops remained in Northern Ireland.

Next, in February 1938, Churchill continued, Chamberlain had said that

tension in Europe had greatly relaxed. A few weeks later Nazi Germany seized Austria. I predicted that he would repeat this statement as soon as the shock of the rape of Austria passed away. He did so in the very same words at the end of July. By the middle of August Germany was mobilising for those bogus manoeuvres which after bringing us all to the verge of a world war, ended in the complete destruction and absorption of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November at the Guildhall, he told us that Europe was settling down into a more peaceful state. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the Nazi atrocities upon the Jewish population resounded throughout the civilised world.

These “proved errors of judgement in the past,” Winston ended, should be weighed carefully when pondering “some of the judgements which have been passed upon the future, the results of which have not yet been proved.”²⁷

The Treasury Bench excepted, Churchill did have an attentive audience in Parliament, and they were its elite, men of eminence and accomplishment in other fields, backbenchers many of them, not because they lacked ministerial talent but because their time for public affairs was limited. In the division over the Munich Agreement, MPs, following their ancient ritual, had left the chamber to vote for or against it. Thirty eminent Conservatives remained seated, however, signifying abstention. This, wrote Nicolson, “must enrage the Government, since it is not our numbers that count but our reputation.” Among the abstainers were Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Leo Amery, Roger Keyes, Macmillan, Sandys, Bracken, and Boothby. This was a sign of party disarray. Rank and file MPs, Nicolson noted, realized that these dissidents “know far more about the real issue than they do.” It was clear that “the Government were rattled by this…. The House breaks up with the Tories yelling to keep their spirits up. But they well know that Chamberlain has put us in a ghastly position and that we ought to have been prepared to go to war and smash Hitler. Next time he will be far too strong for us.” On November 17 Churchill wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “Everyone must recognize that the Prime Minister is pursuing a policy of a most decided character…. By this time next year we shall know whether the Prime Minister’s view of Herr Hitler and the German Nazi Party is right or wrong. By this time next year we shall know whether the policy of appeasement has appeased, or whether it has only stimulated a more ferocious appetite.” Privately he wrote Lord Wolmer on December 12: “Neville leads us from bad to worse.”²⁸

Certainly he had presided over a series of disastrous defeats in 1938, altering the European balance of power and putting in jeopardy nations in eastern Europe which were friendly to France and Britain. The Anschluss and Munich had swollen the Reich’s population by 10,250,000—conscripts for the Wehrmacht, toilers in arms factories, drudges for the expanding empire. But it had already become clear that the safeguards adopted at Munich—the international commission and the guarantee of Czechoslovakia’s new borders—were worthless. The commission met in the Wilhelmstrasse, under Ribbentrop’s eye; the British and French delegates were under instructions, from Halifax and Bonnet, to yield to Hitler whenever possible. Their request for a definition of the impossible was unanswered. And Churchill’s prediction that the Czech state could not survive the butchery of its frontiers in the Führerbau had been swiftly realized. With Beneš gone, the Czech defensive forts in Nazi hands, and ethnic minorities at each other’s throats, the only democracy in eastern Europe was disintegrating. The Slovaks made the first move toward autonomy on October 6; three days later the Ukrainians followed their example; and on November 2 German and Italian arbitrators awarded Hungary nearly 4,600 square miles of Czechoslovakian soil. That left the Czech rump of Bohemia and Moravia, vaguely associated with the independent governments of Slovakia and Ruthenia.

At Chartwell, Churchill read reports of anti-Nazi fugitives from the Sudetenland. They echoed the tales Viennese had told earlier: midnight arrests, Gestapo firing squads, respectable leaders of their communities vanishing into concentration camps. On October 7 Halifax sent Berlin a note citing press accounts of such ill-treatment; he would be grateful, he said, for information “to combat such assertions, the spreading of which might in fact hamper the advocates of Anglo-German relations in the realisation of their aspirations.” Hitler’s response gave Britain’s foreign secretary a lesson straight from Mein Kampf: anyone who agreed to negotiate with Nazis emerged a loser, his wounded pride treated with vigorous applications of salt. Speaking at Saarbrücken two days later, the Führer angrily declared: “We cannot tolerate any longer the tutelage of governesses. Inquiries of British politicians concerning the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich—or of lands belonging to the Reich—are none of their concern.”²⁹

On the last evening of 1938 Nicolson wrote: “It has been a bad year…. A foul year. Next year will be worse.” Churchill, more optimistic, told his constituents in January that while Englishmen like himself doubted that Munich had “purchased a lasting peace,” they felt that at least a “breathing space” had been won. He said: “Let us make sure that this breathing space is not improvidently cast away.” Later, after the Men of Munich had been discredited, that became the keystone of their cover-up; they had, they said, bought time to rearm. It wouldn’t wash. The day after Churchill’s speech, Chamberlain rejected Secretary for War Hore-Belisha’s request for a larger army budget, playing the same weary tune the cabinet had heard so often before, telling them that “finances cannot be ignored, since our financial strength is one of our strongest weapons in any war which is not over in a short time.” As a former chancellor, he said, he thought Britain’s financial position looked “extremely dangerous.” Other ministers argued that Hitler would be shocked by British rearmament, interpreting it as inconsistent with the spirit of Munich, asking why, if the two countries were trusted friends, England was arming to the teeth. Hore-Belisha proposed conscription. He was denied it. Kingsley Wood wanted air parity with Germany. His request was also denied, but because he invested everything he was given in new, superior fighter planes—while the bloated Luftwaffe remained content with what it had—the number of Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons jumped from five to forty-seven in a year. Antiaircraft batteries also multiplied, but “these improvements,” as Churchill later wrote, “were petty compared with the mighty advance in German armaments.”³⁰

In every other category—artillery, tanks, and equipped divisions—Nazi gains were overwhelming. While Chamberlain was lecturing his ministers on the military value of stocks and bonds and spending £304 million on arms, German arms expenditures exceeded £1.5 billion—a fivefold gap. The number of Nazi divisions jumped from seven to fifty-one. By calling up trained reserves, the Reich could field an army of over seven million men, outnumbering the armies of France and England combined, and the Führer, unlike the democracies, did not have troops tied down in colonial possessions overseas. Vis-à-vis France, Churchill found, with every month that passed from 1938 onward the German army not only increased “in numbers and formations… but in quality and maturity.” He believed that “in morale also the Germans had the advantage,” and he attributed the ebbing of French martial resolve to Munich: “The desertion of an ally, especially from fear of war, saps the spirit of any army.”³¹

Less than two months after Munich, Churchill entered his sixty-fifth year, and some parliamentarians, including friends, thought he was beginning to show his age. On Monday, December 5, the House of Commons received its long-awaited report on the preposterous attempt to court-martial Duncan Sandys. Everyone was exonerated; “misunderstandings” were blamed. Churchill rose. He started brilliantly, and everyone, Nicolson wrote, was “expecting a great speech.” Then:

He accuses Hore-Belisha of being too complacent. The latter gets up and says, “When and where?” Winston replies, “I have not come unprepared,” and begins to fumble among his notes, where there are some press-cuttings. He takes time. He finds them. But they are not the best cuttings, and the ones he reads out tend to excuse rather than implicate Hore-Belisha. Winston becomes confused. He tries to rally his speech, but the wind has gone out of his sails, which flop wretchedly. “He is becoming an old man,” says Bill Mabane beside me.³²

It wasn’t age, and he was capable of rebounding. The fact is that he was simply attempting to do too much. Indeed, the wonder is that he found time to appear in the House at all. His writing schedule continued to be punishing, and even as he struggled to meet it, Grace Hamblin recalls, Chartwell was being inundated by a blizzard of invitations to speak. As the taste of Munich turned to ashes, people wanted to see and hear the vindicated Ishmael. He was sensible enough to decline these, though some were tempting: the League of Nations Union, the Oxford Union (from its young president Edward Heath, a future prime minister), and a Jewish Youth Rally for National Service (“because of your courageous defence of freedom and denunciation of Nazi-ism [sic] you are held in the very highest esteem by all sections of Jewry”). He even turned down a dinner invitation from General Edward L. Spears, a fellow officer in Flanders twenty years earlier, explaining that “It is absolutely necessary for me to be in the country every possible night this year in order to complete the history I am writing.”³³

By day, however, he entertained visitors: French politicians, men who had held high posts in Vienna and Prague, and German anti-Nazis, many of them, like Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the Führer’s finance minister, members of the old Wilhelmine aristocracy. In January a high French source sent Chartwell, in great confidence, information unknown to anyone in the British government. Deuxième Bureau agents were reporting that German munitions convoys were moving across Czechoslovakia, from the Sudetenland to the Hungarian frontier. Churchill immediately took this to the Foreign Office, where it was confirmed and then dismissed as part of a program to execute maneuvers and rearm the Austrian army on “the German scale and with German weapons.”³⁴

Of course, Winston could not hew to a spartan regimen. No one could work harder—while writing longer and more strenuously than ever before, he was also in one of his periods of intense bricklaying—but he had no intention of abandoning his sybaritic life-style. In the House of Commons he defended it with wit. Among the unhappiest victims of his gibes was Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was one of the very few on Labour’s side of the House who shared Churchill’s contempt for appeasement; he begged the front bench to rearm before Hitler struck. But he was also ascetic, a vegetarian, a man who shunned coffee and tea and quit smoking cigars because he thought the habit vulgar. “My God,” said Churchill when told of this. “Cripps has cut his last tie with human civilization.” On another, later occasion, Churchill was airborne over the Sahara Desert when his plane had to land for an emergency repair. Winston stretched his legs and gazed in all directions. “Here we are marooned in all these miles of sand—not a blade of grass or a drop of water or a flower,” he said. “How Cripps would have loved it.”³⁵

Churchill did not propose to slacken his pace, but experience had taught him that he could be equally productive, and more comfortable, on the Riviera. Thus, in the first week of January, 1939, after an interview with Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman—“War is horrible,” he told Martin, “but slavery is worse, and you may be sure the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude”—he was off for Maxine’s Château de l’Horizon. Changing trains in Paris, he read in the papers that the Germans had announced a vast plan to expand their submarine fleet. Before unpacking in Cannes he wrote and cabled home a Daily Telegraph column, calling the Nazi U-boat program “a heavy blow to all international cooperation in support of public law.” It meant, he said, that England was imperiled by an “avoidable danger” which could only be mastered after great “loss and suffering.” The Telegraph was unread in Cannes, but a local newspaper subscribed to his syndicate, and there was a stirring in the lush villas when the same paper ran an earlier piece in which Churchill pondered an Anglo-Soviet détente. Among its readers was the quondam king of England, now Duke of Windsor, and he was splenetic.³⁶

To Churchill, Edward’s wrath, once majestic, now seemed more like petty whining. By now Winston had shed all illusions about the man he had championed, at such cost to his career and the cause he led. There was, he noted, no depth to the man; he never read a serious book, never gave the world’s affairs profound thought, and what he presented as opinion was merely narrow, ill-informed prejudice. He doted on his wife, who ordered him about, apparently to his delight. Winston was amused by Wallis’s sartorial influence on her husband. On the memorable night when the Duke crossed swords with Churchill in Maxine’s white-and-gold dining room he was wearing a Stuart tartan kilt. He was lucky Winston didn’t leave him without a fig leaf, according to the account of Vincent Sheean, who kept notes when, as he wrote,

the Duke of Windsor and Mr. Churchill settled down to a prolonged argument, with the rest of the party listening in silence…. We sat by the fireplace, Mr. Churchill frowning with intentness at the floor in front of him, mincing no words, reminding HRH of the British constitution on occasion—“When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings,” he said—and declaring flatly that the nation stood in the gravest danger of its long history. The kilted Duke… sat on the edge of the sofa, eagerly interrupting whenever he could, contesting every point, but receiving—in terms of the utmost politeness as far as the words went—an object lesson in political wisdom and public spirit…. There was something dramatically final, irrevocable about this dispute.³⁷

According to Sheean and their hostess, those who thought of Winston as doddering should have been there that evening. Afterward Maxine wrote Churchill, “Never have I seen you in such good form…. You are the most enormously gifted creature in the whole world and it is like the sunshine leaving when you go away.” England was not like sunshine to him. “People talk of how brave Winston was in 1940,” Lady Diana Cooper observed, “but his highest courage, and it was his moral courage, shone through when he saw war coming, England virtually helpless, and himself impotent—when he spoke the truth and men he had entertained in his home cut him in Parliament Square.” He took it; he had to take it, but he didn’t have to like it. Writhing in the bonds of his frustration he reminded Virginia Cowles of “a mighty torrent trying to burst its dam.”³⁸

That was one aspect of him, and to all but the few close to him it was the intrinsic Churchill, his quiddity and diathesis. Most public men have one personality for the world and another in private. Winston Churchill was an exception. In his greater speeches he could hold Parliament spellbound; at Chartwell his guests were entranced as he used the same language, mannerisms, and expression. He could reminisce with old comrades, and the emotional undercurrent was always there. His eyes would fill, but like a sun shower the misty moment passed. The only people who saw the intimate Churchill—who knew the power and depth of his love, which lay within him like a vast reservoir eternally replenishing itself, available to them in boundless measure when they were parched or careworn—those few whom he cherished, were his family. His awareness of them was constant. In the middle of a letter on another topic in early 1939, he interpolated: “Mary has been… vy sweet to me and is growing into her beauty.” His son had tried him as few fathers have been tried; nevertheless, it was understood that once Randolph married and began his own family, Chartwell would be his: his parents would move into more modest quarters. Creating those quarters was the impulse behind Churchill’s renewed interest in bricklaying. Some diversion from his writing was essential, and he was aware of it. There were only so many productive working hours in a day; anything written beyond that was chaff. So he painted, fed his goldfish, savored his Pol Roger, and laid his bricks, letting his mind drift and rejuvenating his powers of thought.³⁹

As usual, he had a new Chartwell improvement in progress. He was, he wrote Clemmie on January 28, supervising the tiling of roofs, putting down new floors, and “the joinery of the doors, cupboards, etc.” Any other country squire at his age might have been overseeing such projects. But Churchill, as always, had grander plans. He was already building one cottage on the grounds with his own hands and planning another—for Clemmie and himself—when he retired and Randolph became Chartwell’s householder. He wrote her: “In the summer when I am sure the book will be finished, I think I will build a house.” It would stand on ten acres far from the mansion, he wrote, and would “cost about three thousand pounds.” This was reasonable. Assuming he met the terms of his continuing contract for the English-speaking Peoples and completed assignments for Collier’s, News of the World, the Daily Mirror, and his fortnightly syndicated columns, his literary earnings for 1939 would be £15,781. But knowing her dread of debt, he assured her that “we could sell it for five or six thousand pounds.” After he had met all his writing deadlines he planned to ask Sir Edwin Lutyens, the eminent architect, for appraisals and opinions, hastily adding: “He will do this for nothing, I am sure, as he has always begged to give advice.” For Winston the immediate value of the construction would be recreational: “It would amuse me all the summer and give me good health.” To further soothe her he promised that “downstairs you will have one lovely big room” and “you may be sure that nothing will be done until you have passed the plans. I have at least two months work ahead on the present cottage.” He had already christened it “Orchard Cottage.”⁴⁰

This letter reached her in Barbados. The year just passed, so disastrous for British diplomacy, had also been wobbly for her. A succession of minor ailments discouraged activity, and in July she had spent nearly three weeks alone in the French Pyrenees “taking the cure.” In Paris she had broken her toe, a minor affliction but painful and slow to heal. Then came Munich and Winston’s denunciation of it. Early in their marriage, as the wife of a politician who took unpopular stands, she had known that part of the price he paid—social opprobrium—must be shared by her. At first, when old acquaintances crossed the street to avoid greeting her, she had been shocked and hurt. She had been young and resilient then, however; tempered by her own anger, she had learned to take such shabby partisanship in her stride. It had seemed a small sacrifice; she shared her husband’s convictions and was proud to be his wife. The pride was still there, but she was older now, and slights were harder to bear. Her spirits were at their lowest when deliverance, or what looked like it, appeared in the form of an invitation from Lord Moyne, suggesting that she join him and his friends for another voyage on the Rosaura, this time in the Caribbean. She loved the yacht and loved the idyllic islands, but her hopes of recapturing the ecstasy of their South Seas cruise four years earlier were crushed. As an unreconstructed Liberal she was outraged by conditions in the British West Indies. “These islands,” she wrote Winston, “are beautiful in themselves but have been desecrated & fouled by man.” Starchy food kept the population “alive but undernourished—eighty percent of the population is illegitimate, seventy percent (in several islands) have syphilis and yaws.” There was no sanitation of any sort, not even earth latrines. “And this,” she bitterly concluded, “is a sample of the British Empire upon which the sun never sets.”⁴¹

She felt he was neglecting her. In the past, when they were parted he had sent her long, clever holographs, decorated with drawings of pigs or pug dogs. Now, preoccupied with his manuscripts, avalanches of mail, and the recurring crises in Parliament, he dictated notes or cables. She responded tartly: “Please don’t telegraph—I hate telegrams just saying ‘all well rainy weather love Winston.’ ” The news he did send was worse than none: an obituary of Sir Sidney Peel, who had fallen in love with her when she was eighteen, just after the turn of the century. She had nearly married him; twice they had been secretly engaged. Winston commented: “Many are dying that I knew when we were young. It is quite astonishing to reach the end of life & feel just as you did fifty years before. One must always hope for a sudden end, before faculties decay.” By the time the Rosaura approached Nelson’s old dockyard on Antigua, Clemmie was plainly homesick. “I miss you & Mary & home terribly,” she wrote, “& although it is a boon to miss the English Winter & to bask in this warmth, I really think I should come home—only that I hope this prolonged voyage in warm weather will really set me up in health—I do not yet feel very strong, but I am sure I shall.”⁴²

She found strength when, following the news and reading Winston’s letters—now frequent, long, and penitent—she realized how lonely and embattled he must be. In the February 9 Daily Telegraph he had ruefully conceded that support for a firm stand against Nazi aggression was still weak, that “ripples of optimism” to the contrary were, “alas,” based on “insufficient justifications.” He pointed out that the press had reported long troop trains passing through Vienna and Munich and asked “What is their destination? What is their purpose?” Obviously, the British public didn’t care. Mussolini was mobilizing for an invasion of Albania, and Hitler had announced that Germany would support the Duce: “Indeed, it is clear that the German dictator could not afford to witness the downfall of his Italian colleague.”

Nevertheless, England remained lethargic. In an attempt to rouse it, he had left his Disraeli desk for a whirlwind lecture tour, but his audiences had been small and tepid. To a friend he wrote: “Nothing but the terrible teaching of experience will affect this all-powerful, supine Government. The worst of it is that by the time they are convinced, or replaced, our own position will be frightfully weakened.” Hitler appeared determined to fight on one issue or another; it hardly seemed to matter which. And each fresh concession by Chamberlain and Halifax debilitated Britain as the inevitable showdown approached.⁴³

In the middle of one letter home Clementine blurted out, “O Winston, are we drifting into War?” England, it seemed, yearning for peace and all but defenseless, was nevertheless tottering toward the brink “without the wit to avoid it or the will to prepare for it.” Then she scrawled across the page: “God bless you my darling.” Thus clouds were gathering within her, and sooner or later Clementine’s overcast moods led to an outburst. One that entered Churchill family lore occurred when Moyne and his guests were listening to a BBC political broadcast. The speaker was vehemently pro-appeasement—Sir John Reith banned any arguments from the other side—and when Churchill was attacked by name, Lady Vera Broughton, another member of the party, cried: “Hear, Hear!” Clementine awaited a conciliatory word from her host, but he compressed his lips and remained silent. That put the wind in her sails. She flew to her cabin, wrote him a note of explanation, and packed. Lady Broughton arrived, begging Clemmie to stay, in vain; Winston Churchill had been insulted, and Mrs. Winston Churchill would accept no apologies. Ashore, she booked a berth on the Cuba, which was sailing for England in the morning.⁴⁴

As she entered Chartwell’s front hall she cried their old mating call: “Wot!” And from deep within the mansion came the delighted echo: “Wot!” He embraced her, heard her story with pride and pleasure, described his progress on the manuscript, and then broke the news, as gently as possible, of a new attempt to expel him from Parliament. This second campaign, four months after the first, was again led by Thornton-Kemsley. But “Peace for our time,” which had pealed across the land then, now had a hollow ring. Winston knew he had but to hire a hall or two, give tongue to what was in his heart, and his constituents would come gamboling to him.

That was his strategy, and it worked, first in Chigwell, on March 10, 1939, and then at Waltham Abbey four days later. He was in fine, fiery form at Chigwell, repeating his indictment of Munich (“I do not withdraw a single word”), declaring that he would “cordially support” larger defense appropriations, approved of a recent Chamberlain call at the Soviet embassy “to show the world” that Britain was prepared to cooperate with Moscow “so long as Russia continues to show herself an active friend to peace,” and—this was mendacious—saying, “I have been out of office for ten years, but I am more contented with the work I have done in these past five years as an Independent Conservative than of any other part of my public life.” He asked them: “What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people?”⁴⁵

Winston was confident, and no wonder. In the months following Munich, Hitler himself had entered the fray on behalf of those working against Churchill. No doubt the Führer had felt provoked: “When you look long into an abyss,” Nietzsche wrote, “the abyss also looks into you.” Churchill had been glaring at the Reich since the birth of the Nazi regime, and as the Führer looked up and their eyes locked, staring across the North Sea, Hitler impulsively decided to hound his gadfly from public life. The Führer had been nettled by the attempts of Britons, and particularly Winston in his syndicated columns, to arouse anti-Nazi Germans. Speaking at Weimar he said: “If Mr. Churchill had less to do with traitors and more with Germans, he would see how mad his talk is, for I can assure this man, who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Germany opposed to the régime—only the force of the National Socialist movement, its leaders and its followers in arms.” If Churchill returned to office, he predicted that his “aim would be to unleash [loslassen] at once a new world war against Germany.”⁴⁶

Churchill immediately issued a statement expressing surprise that “the head of a great State” should attack private members of Parliament “who hold no official position and who are not even leaders of parties.” He said: “Such action on his part can only enhance any influence they may have, because their fellow countrymen have long been able to form their own opinions about them, and really do not need foreign guidance.” As A. J. P. Taylor puts it, Hitler tried to “split British opinion.” Assuming that Englishmen could be manipulated like Germans, he believed that advocacy of British rearmament would raise opposition among England’s pro-Germans—whose number he vastly exaggerated, and whom he expected to sway by denouncing Winston as a “warmonger” (“Kriegshetzer”). This, he thought, would be Churchill’s undoing. It was a kolossal error. The voters, in Taylor’s words, “resented Hitler’s interference in their affairs. They believed in non-interference. Hitler could do what he liked in Eastern Europe; he could demolish Czechoslovakia or invade the Ukraine. But he must leave British politicians alone.” His demands that Churchill be routed gave the English Kriegshetzers, Taylor observes, “a popularity which they could not have won for themselves.”⁴⁷

One wonders who, or what, was behind the challenges to Churchill. Obscure backbenchers are voted in and out of the House, but no one could remember a concerted attempt to unseat an eminent statesman known and respected in every European capital. There was gossip of German money being distributed among Winston’s critics, but this lurid version is wholly without evidence. Thornton-Kemsley hinted at a more plausible source of support when he said that unless Winston was prepared to work with “our great Prime Minister, he ought no longer to shelter under the goodwill and name which attaches to a great Party.” Later he added: “It was made clear to me that the growing ‘revolt’ in the Epping Division… was welcomed in high places.”⁴⁸

How high he did not say, but it was hardly a secret that the P.M. would be glad to see his eloquent critic retired; he had written his sister that Winston was “carrying on a regular campaign against me with the aid of [Jan] Masaryk, the Czech minister. They, of course, are totally unaware of my knowledge of their proceedings.” He said he had “information of their doings & sayings which for the nth time demonstrated how completely Winston can deceive himself when he wants to, & how utterly credulous a foreigner can be when he is told the things he wants to hear.” It seems unlikely that Chamberlain would instigate a plot against Churchill, but it is even unlikelier that Tories “in high places” would encourage Thornton-Kemsley without the knowledge and even the support of the party’s national leader. Viewed in any light, the effort to unseat Churchill is depressing, a symptom of the squalid political intrigues which afflicted England as her hour of peril approached—and a direct consequence, ironically, of a selfless but mindless crusade for peace.⁴⁹

Entering Waltham Abbey for his speech on March 14, Winston was handed a report that Nazi troops were massing along the frontiers of mutilated Czechoslovakia. At the lectern he departed from his notes to say: “The Czechoslovakian Republic is being broken up before our eyes. They are being completely absorbed; and not until the Nazi shadow has finally been lifted from Europe—as lifted I am sure it will eventually be—not until then will Czechoslovakia and ancient Bohemia again march into freedom.” But, he added, to suppose that this new aggression did not threaten England was “a profound illusion.” Although Britain could “do nothing to stop it,” Britons would suffer “on a very great scale.” Not only would they have to make financial sacrifices, which “would have been unnecessary if a firm resolve had been taken at an earlier stage,” but English lives would be forfeit, and for the same reason.⁵⁰

Late that night, after a BBC broadcast announced that Hitler had annexed Bohemia, Churchill—who was at the time writing about the late seventeenth century—told his son: “It’s hard to take one’s attention off the events of today and concentrate on the reign of James II—but I’m going to do it.” It was perhaps the most remarkable example of his genius for concentration. Randolph stared in astonishment as his father rose and plodded up the stairs to his study. The reports were, in fact, extraordinary, and the following day they were confirmed. Barely three years earlier, in the Friedensrede following his Rhineland coup, the Führer of the Third Reich had assured the world that he had “no territorial demands” to make in Europe, and that “Germany will never break the peace!” At Munich he had told Chamberlain that he wanted no Czechs in his realm and had even joined the British prime minister in guaranteeing the frontiers of the truncated Czech state. Now, on March 15, he was entering its capital at the head of his troops, standing erect in an open Mercedes, beaming and extending a stiff-armed Hitlergruss. But here, unlike Vienna and the Sudetenland, few arms rose in response. The Czechs were stunned. So was all Europe. So was Neville Chamberlain.⁵¹

HITLER IN PRAGUE!” screamed the newspaper posters on kiosks throughout England. What, outraged Englishmen asked one another, was he doing there? They had read his personal pledges to Chamberlain at Munich and his promise to be guided by the international commission, which would recognize Reich sovereignty only in “predominantly German” areas. Most Britons were unaware that Germany had ignored the commission with the connivance of London and Paris, unaware of Czechoslovakia’s slow disintegration, unaware that the Nazis had, in defiance of the Munich Agreement, “awarded” Hungary and then Poland large tracts of Czech territory, inhabited by over one and a quarter million citizens of Czechoslovakia, none of them German, now made citizens of other states. These ominous events, heavy with implications, had been reported in the British press, but only briefly and obscurely.

His Majesty’s Government had not prepared their countrymen for this blow. The fact is that they, too, were unprepared for the Prague invasion. In Hitler’s most recent speech he had reflected upon how fortunate the world would be if Britons and Germans could unite “in full confidence with one another.” On March 10, only five days before Hitler’s Prague coup, the P.M. had told the House of Commons that the Continent was now “settling down to a period of tranquillity.” Hoare, speaking next, had predicted that if Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Chamberlain, and Daladier were to work in tandem they could banish nightmares of war and burdens of armament and thus “in an incredibly short space of time transform the whole history of the world.” As a consequence of this joint effort, Hoare had envisioned a new “Golden Age,” whose promise would be realized if the “jitterbugs”—singling out those who had appealed for a stronger British military presence: Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Bracken, Amery, Boothby, Sandys, Nicolson, Macmillan, and Keyes—were denied their goals.⁵²

A backbencher softly quoted Shakespeare:

That England, being empty of defense

Hath shook and trembled at the ill neighborhood….

Hoare was fatuous, and Churchill knew it, but he could not deliver a plausible rebuke without exposing informants already being tailed by the Gestapo. Two weeks after Munich, Hitler had summoned Frantisek Chvalkovsky, Prague’s new pro-German foreign minister, and told him that Czechoslovakia must abandon her cordial relationship with Britain and become reconciled to her “proper place” as a colony of the Reich. The Czechs must “not play any tricks with Germany.” If they did, “in twenty-four hours—no, in eight hours—I’ll finish her off [mache ich Schluss]!” The following month one of Winston’s sources sent him a secret memorandum in which the Führer had described the next phase of his foreign policy to Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker. Britain, he had said, “must be attacked with speeches and in the press… first the Opposition, and then Chamberlain himself.” Munich had taught him “how to deal with the English—one had to move aggressively [vor den Bauch treten].” His objective, he declared, was “to overthrow Chamberlain.” The Opposition, he assumed—an absurd assumption, revealing his ignorance of parliamentary rule—“would not then be capable of forming a new government, and the same would occur as in France. The political strength of Great Britain would be paralyzed” and “Fascism would gain the upper hand.”⁵³

On March 12, three days before Hitler’s rape of the rump Czech state, Chartwell had received another report from an agent in Brno, Moravia. “Hitler,” Winston had learned, “is coming to Vienna”—fifty miles from Prague—“this week.” Swastika banners “lavishly decorated” a “great many public buildings,” and each evening Czech Nazis “gathered in or around the Deutsches Haus to sing and demonstrate.” One night a procession of anti-Nazis paraded by the German House; the men wearing the hakenkreuz brassards shouted “Sieg Heil!” and sang the “Horst Wessel Song.” These Nazis had been told that “Hitler will come on March 15 and the greeting ‘Heil Marz!’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler!’ has been quite common for some weeks.”⁵⁴

On the morning of March 14 the Slovakian legislature, which had been quarreling with the national government in Prague, had declared its independence. This presented the Führer with his opportunity. Obviously, he declared, Prague could not control its people. The Czechs were informed of his displeasure by Ribbentrop, who stressed the need for an immediate solution. At 10:40 P.M.—just as Churchill’s meeting at Waltham Abbey was breaking up—a train bearing Chvalkovsky and Dr. Emil Hácha, formerly a judge of Czechoslovakia’s supreme court and now the country’s president, drew into Berlin’s Anhalt Station. An SS guard of honor escorted them to the Hotel Adlon and then the Reich Chancellery, where the Führer kept them waiting until 1:15 A.M. Hácha was no Masaryk, no Beneš; he had come prepared to grovel. He denounced his great predecessors and actually said that after Munich “I asked myself whether it was a good thing for Czechoslovakia to be an independent state at all.” He realized that the destiny of his country lay “in the Führer’s hands, and I believe it is in safekeeping in such hands.” He knew that the Czechs had a bad reputation in the Wilhelmstrasse. His explanation was that “there still exist many supporters of the Beneš regime.” But, he was “trying by every means to silence them.” He meekly added that he hoped the Führer “will understand my holding the view that Czechoslovakia has the right to live a national life.”⁵⁵

Hitler didn’t understand it, however. Hácha’s “Rump State” (“Rest-bestand”), he said, owed its very existence to his indulgence. At Munich he had hoped that the Czechs, under new leadership, would mend their ways, but he had also resolved that “if the Beneš tendencies did not completely disappear he would completely destroy this state.” It was now obvious that they had not disappeared. Therefore, last Sunday, March 12, “die Würfel waren gefallen” (“the die was cast”). He had issued the orders for the invasion by German troops and for the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich. Schmidt, his interpreter, noted that the Czechs “sat as though turned to stone. Only their eyes showed that they were alive.” Hitler told them that at 6:00 A.M., on his orders, his armies would cross their borders near points where the Luftwaffe had already seized Czech airfields. Any attempts at defense would be broken by “rohe Gewalt” (“brute force”). He paused. Of course, he said, they had a choice. If the defenders laid down their arms the Führer would treat them with generosity, assure their autonomy, and even grant them a certain measure of freedom. He suggested they step into the next room and talk it over.⁵⁶

Awaiting them there were Göring and Ribbentrop, who literally chased them around a table strewn with documents, thrusting the papers at them, pushing pens into their hands, shouting that if they refused to sign, within two hours half of Prague would be bombed to ruins and their families slain. Suddenly Schmidt heard Göring shout: “Hácha hat einen Schwächeanfall bekommen!” Hácha, who had a heart condition, had indeed fainted, and a single thought crossed the minds of the Germans: the world would say that Czechoslovakia’s president had been murdered in the Reich Chancellery. Then Dr. Theodor Morell—Hitler’s personal physician, whose strange drugs later addicted the Führer—gave Hácha an injection. A special telephone line to Prague had been rigged up; over it, in a slurred voice, the revived president advised the cabinet to capitulate. Morell gave him another shot, and both Czechs signed the papers. It was 3:55 A.M. Two hours later German troops swarmed over the shrunken Czech frontier. Hácha was appointed governor of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. But the world already knew who really ruled the country now. Hitler had told them. Before retiring for the night in Hradschin Palace he issued a triumphant statement: “Die Tschechoslowakei existiert nicht mehr!”—“Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.”⁵⁷

That evening, as Hitler slept in his hijacked palace, Churchill dined at the Grillions Club with Sir Horace Rumbold, formerly His Majesty’s ambassador to Berlin, who had been dismissed after the Nazis, opening his pouches, found he was reporting the facts about Hitler’s regime and demanded an envoy more sympathetic to the Führer’s policies. Rumbold was in low spirits. Learning that Hitler was in Prague, he concluded that “Even Chamberlain’s eyes must now be opened to the fact that Hitler’s statements and assurances are not worth the breath with which they have been uttered…. I confess that I have never in my life been so disheartened as I am now.” He was angry that the Foreign Office had ignored his warnings six years before and that Chamberlain had been so gulled by Hitler. Over the past few months, however, he had begun to note “increasing disgust with Germany” on all levels of British society and “a growing conviction that there is nothing to be done with the Nazis.”

This, he told Churchill, gave him a flicker of hope. And yet there were Englishmen who were still working toward an Anglo-German alliance. One, he said, was Lord Brocket, whom he regarded as “among the most gullible of asses.” Brocket had been shooting with Göring. Göring had entrusted him with news of great importance: “Neither he [Göring] nor Hitler had any knowledge of the recent Nazi action against the Jews.” On reflection Rumbold became convinced that further aggression by Nazis in 1939 was inevitable. The following day he wrote to his brother: “This year… is their last opportunity of doing so with any chance of success.” There was a general feeling of uneasiness, he wrote Churchill that same afternoon. “You asked me last night what I thought of the present situation. I replied that I was profoundly disheartened. This was an understatement…. I have never felt so depressed or so nauseated as I feel now and this because it seems to me that our Government have, for a year or more, failed to look ahead or to understand the character of the man with whom they are dealing…. I only hope that it will not enter into the PM’s head to pay Hitler another visit.” On March 20 Churchill replied, thanking Rumbold for his letter and adding: “Since you wrote it events have told their unanswerable tale.”⁵⁸

“The blow has been struck,” Churchill told his readers on March 24. Hitler had “broken every tie of good faith with the British and French who tried so hard to believe in him. The Munich agreement which represented such great advantages for Germany has been brutally violated.” British confidence in the Nazi hierarchy

can never again be mended while the present domination rules in Germany…. A veritable revolution in feeling and opinion has occurred in Britain, and reverberates through all the self-governing Dominions. Indeed, a similar process has taken place spontaneously throughout the whole British Empire. This mass conversion of those who had hitherto been hopeful took place within a single week, but not within a single day. It was not an explosion, but the kindling of a fire which rose steadily, hour by hour, to an intense furnace heat of inward conviction.⁵⁹

That, or something like it, had indeed happened. A profound shift in public opinion was noted all over Britain. Hitler’s Prague coup—which was followed, in a week, by his annexation of Memel, part of Lithuania—was the pivotal event in turning round British public opinion. The spirit of friendship between London and Berlin, which Chamberlain believed had been the fruit of Munich, had, in A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase, “lost its glitter.” And Robert Rhodes James, after reviewing the period, concludes:

All that can be said, and said with absolute justice, is that after the annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the possibility of averting war with Germany was entertained only by a minority in Britain. By some strange process which is inexplicable to those who were not alive that year, the fear of war which had been so evident in 1938 seemed to evaporate. The British did not want war, but… there was a weariness with procrastination, an aversion to false promises and wishful thinking, and a yearning for a simple, clear solution.⁶⁰