Faraway Country Revisited

By BRIAN INGLIS

"1' NEVILLE CHAMBEALAIN. By lain Macleod.

(Muller, .30s.)

It succeeds in proving that Chamberlain has been almost as undervalued since 1940 as he was overvalued after his return from Munich. He was, admittedly, a slow starter; there was, an early unfortunate excursion into sisal-grow- ing, and he was a. failure in his first ministerial

,• post. But thereafter his ministerial career was

at worst competent; at best very effective. Mr. Macleod overemphasises the 'social reformer'; by contrast with most of his colleagues Cham- berlain was certainly that, but more from a desire for ordered efficiency than from any ele- vated notions of the rights or the dignity of man. He was in the Canning tradition of Conser- vatism; comparable to the businessman who.im- proves the lighting in his factory because it in- creases productivity and, diminishes absenteeism; if he was in favour of a representative of labour on boards of directors, it was as a safety valve rather than as a piston. Of..underdoggery he had all Canning's suspicion, particularly in its poli- tical manifestations: Baldwin had to rebuke him in 1927 for always giving the impression in the Commons that he regarded members of the Labour Party as dirt. Yet by comparison with his colleagues he was ahead of his time; he deserves the credit which before. this .book

he has rarely received. - So if, as Mr. Macleod goes on to suggest. 'Munich and the months that followed were not the natural fulfilment of his life and career,' it would have been reasonable to admit that Chamberlain had blundered' in 1938; and to argue simply that this One mistake, however disastrous, should not be .,allowed to distract attention from his very real qualities. and achievements. But Mr. Macleod cannot let well alone. He feels bound to defend Chamberlain's actions and pronouncements in 1938; and by doing S6—as, indeed, he must have realised when he saw the serialised version blazoned on, posters under the title 'Man of Munich'—concentrates critical attention on that deplorable episode.

Lord' Avon told a Sunday Times interviewer a few weeks ago that this is an unhappy time to bring out a defence-of appeasement: 'in the present international situation it is certainly not a policy the West can pursue if it intends to

survive.' But surely for that very reason it is all the more important that appeasement should be discussed and understood. The term, after all, is capable of different interpretations; as Mr. Macleod points out, Eden used it to describe his own policy as Foreign Minister in 1936, when it had no Danegeld connotation; it merely indi- cated a desire to explore pacific ways to remove international tensions. There could hardly have been a more propitious moment for any study of Munich than the present—so long as it throws light on what appeasement then achieved. And it is indeed illuminating—though not in the way the author intends.

For Munich was, in a very real sense, the natural fulfilment of Chamberlain's life and career. His rise had been largely fortuitous. He had been written off as a failure during the First World War; he owed his emergence to Baldwin's need for known names in his first administra- tion and, later, to Baldwin's need of a proven administrator, the species being rare in the higher reaches of the Conservative Party (which could find nobody better qualified than Sir Thomas Inskin to be Minister for the Co- ordination of Defence in 1936; it must have been barren of talent indeed). And by then, there was no alternative Prime Minister in sight; Chamberlain it had to -be, which meant he had to begin handling foreign affairs; and 'an earnest opinionated provincial,' as Vansittart later com- mented, 'was bound to err if he plunged into diplomacy.' Mr. Macleod complains that this did not reflect the opinion of the best judges of the day; but the best judges realised the alternatives were even more lamentable (Eden, after all, owed his eventual promotion to the embarrassing absence of competition from his elders). Cham- berlain simply did not have the training or the aptitude for the task.

It is tempting to say he was too stupid for it ; but 'clever' and 'stupid,' as Lady Asquith once pointed out, are 'epithets neither of which covers the ground in describing any man of prOminence.' There is a sense in which she was right: Baldwin, after all, seemed stupid to some Of his contemporaries, and Von Papen seemed 'incredibly stupid' to Chamberlain. But Cham- berlain was capable of crass inanities; from his approval Of Baldwin as Bonar Law's successor ('after all, he is a businessman') to his hunch that the Germans would collapse in the spring of 1940. And many of them are omitted from this biography: there is no mention, for ex- ample, of Chamberlain's reason for opposing the suggestion that King Edward should be given more time for reflection in the Abdication crisis: 'the continued uncertainty has already hurt the Christmas trade.'

In diplomacy he was quite out of his depth: a ready dupe for rogues. He only appears to have begun seriously. to consider taking a hand in foreign affairs in 1935. Earlier, he had resisted suggestions that he should go to the FO; as late as December, 1934, he was complaining he could not afford it; 'moreover, I should hate the journeys to Geneva and above all 1 should loathe and detest the social ceremonies.' Yet be so despised Simon than when Eden fell ill at the time of the Stresa Conference, four months later, the only suitable candidate he could think of was himself. Good native common sense, he obviously felt, made experience unnecessary— such vanity being a characteristic which he shared with his friend Geoffrey Dawson, of the Times (incidentally, it is another astounding omission that Dawson is only mentioned in passing: the notorious Sudeten leader is not mentioned at all. No defence of the Govern- ment's actions at this time can afford such gaps).

Mr. Macleod insists that Chamberlain was not deceived by Hitler; but this view is hardly tenable. '1 got the impression,' he wrote after his first meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, that here was a man who could be relied upon when he has given his word.' Even if this re- ferred only to the period pending the resumption of negotiations, as Mr. Macleod believes, who can seriously doubt that Hitler would have broken his word in this interim, had it been expedient? In any case, the Boy Scout ter- minology is damning: Chamberlain was treating Hitler as if he were a public-school man who bad gone to the bad, but was still capable of redemption.

The standard argument put forward by apolo- gi'sts for Munich, and repeated by Mr. Macleod, is that the pause that followed gave Britain vital time to catch up with German military prepara- tions; for although in a sense she fell behind still farther—German rearmament was proceed- roceed- ing even faster at the time—at least she was able to put herself on sufficient of a war footing to be able to resist in 1940.

This view, though it contradicts Churchill's, is reasonable. In 1938, as Mr. Macleod shows, Britain simply lacked the means to defend herself. And the psychological weakness was even greater than he suggests. The derided 'King and Coun- try' motion reflected a widespread fear, not simply that war would be fought for the wrong reasons, but of war itself. But whose fault was this? It was because of flabbiness on the Right that the rot on the Left could take hold : be- cause of Baldwin's sealed lips over Abyssinia; because of the deceptions which he was later to confess in his 'appalling frankness' speech.

Yet all the blame cannot be put on Baldwin. His evasiveness before the 1935 election can just be defended on the excuse that if the Con- servatives had lost, the country would have been in an even worse pass under a—pacifist—Labour Government. But on Churchill's argument, which Mr. Macleod quotes with approval, that rearmament is a four-year task ('the first year yields nothing; the second very little; the third a lot; and the fourth is a flood), by 1938 Britain should have reached a position of some strength. In theory, she had; just before Munich, Cham- berlain boasted of her 'terrifying' strength. But in October, after Munich, Minister after Minister admitted that the defence programme was barely off the drawing board; the guns, the tanks, the aeroplanes were still largely paper. Nor is it possible to show that Chamberlain was playing for time at Munich. He believed he had secured a just and lasting settlement; when he held up that scrap of paper at Heston a news- reel cameraman caught the look on his face: an expression of terrifyingly inane self-satisfaction. Mr. Macleod implies that disillusionment a As rapid. He does not mention that on March 10. 1939, Chamberlain issued a statement that the international outlook was satisfactory, and that there was no cause for anxiety. Within a ■■;:ek, the grateful Germans had entered Prague.

It is not a valid defence to say that the coun- try was With him over Munich; though it certainly was, in the wave of relief that followed his re- turn. The la§t comparable emotional orgasm had been on a very dissimilar occasion, after the relief of Mafeking; but Mafcking, like Munich, was to become a dirty word in retrospect; and rightly, for such manifestations are something for which a community should be ashamed of itself. In any case, even those who shared the pre- vailing relief by no means shared Chamberlain's sanguine attitude. I happened to have been in Germany earlier that summer, and had come away in the certain conviction that Nazism meant war; the relief of Munich was simply that it did not mean war there and then. Many of us felt the relief children feel at the postponement of punishment—and the guilt when it falls on an innocent party.

Mr. Macleod praises Chamberlain's 'sym- pathetic and understanding bearing' over Czecho- slovakia in the House of Commons, where he ex- pressed 'profound sympathy for a small and gal- lant nation in the hour of their national grief,' contrasting this with 'the peremptory and even brutal attitude of Daladier.' But there is another way of looking at it: that Daladicr, realising What he had done, was not prepared to cloak his crime with cant; and that Chamberlain, in the circumstances, was being odiously sanctimonious.

The last line of defence for appeasement is that the Czechoslovaks ought not to have been sus- tained by alliances to the point of war, because after the Anschluss Czechoslovakia was indefen- sible. Perhaps; but so was Poland indefensible in September, 1939. Britain had to go to war then in very difficult circumstances, because the rickety structure of appeasement had filially crumbled, compelling recognition that Munich and all it stood for had been a futile as well as a shameful chapter in the national story, And the moral? There are too many parallels for comfort. The 1930s had its blind Left, too. It had its peace movement: run by a turbulent priest, Dick Sheppard; and goaded on by a Philosopher, Bertrand Russell—who now boasts that he was a supporter of the war against Nazism, but who in 1936 wrote a book ex- pounding a 'rational pacifism' policy, urging that Britain should disarm and announce to the world she would not fight for any cause. Would he have fought Hitler with bare fists?

The Opposition. too, then as now, was split on disarmament. But the real culprit was the National Government, which from weakness, ig- norance and political expediency allowed the country's defences to run down: explaining away each move of Hitler's with a litany of queasy rationalisations—from Lothian's 'only going into their own back garden,' when German troops en- tered the Rhineland, to Chamberlain's 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing' (yet another omission from this book), after the rape of Czechoslovakia.

We know now that if Britain had had the knowledge and the will to stand fast on all treaty obligations in the middle Thirties, the world would have been spared much misery and bloodshed. If the cap fits . . .