Nostalgie de la guerre
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I, like no doubt many thousands of others, have been reading with intense pleasure the second volume of Harold Nicolson's Diaries. On the general merits of the book, this is not the place to comment; but there is one aspect of the second volume which I think might be stressed. It is not so much that Harold Nicol- son tells us a great deal about the House of Commons in wartime or about the difficulties of the Ministry of Information: it is that his book brings back the atmosphere of wartime London better than any other book that I know. (A novel by Elizabeth Bowen, half in London and half in Ireland, did This almost as well, but on a much narrower front.) The Diaries are full of sops of madeleine for anyone who remembers, or thinks he remembers, the war years.
There is a great deal about the curious social life of the war, about the strains and stresses of life under wartime conditions. But what I found more interesting and more effec- tive in reviving my memory were the reports and rumours of that strenuous time. Being highly intelligent, Harold Nicolson knew how grim our prospects were after the fall of France; but, oddly enough, a great many people didn't realise this. Low's famous cartoon of the British soldier shaking his fist at the Nazis, with some such title as 'Alone at last,' was stimulating but not very comforting to people who knew how alone we were.
I remember how the reporting of the war managed to conceal the dangers of our situa- tion with great and, I think, justifiable success, although I can remember Lord Robbins com- plaining that his intelligent children thought that Dunkirk was a victory because that was bow it was reported, while it was merely not a total disaster. The contrast between people living in London and the rest of the country,
even in Cambridge or Oxford, was also very great. So was the contrast between those who had some knowledge and those who had none. So we have here reports of various triumphs and defeats, the defeats less mythical than the triumphs. Harold Nicolson quite rightly points out that there was no visible sign on the horizon of any way of our winning the war.
I can remember discussing this question (as an historian) with George Trevelyan, and both of us agreed that the situation was worse than it had been in 1805, for there was no Trafalgar in prospect and nobody was quite certain that the days of sea power were not over. A female don who was present was deeply shocked. Yet I have no memory of being deeply depressed, although I should have found it difficult to say why not. A question I was asked a year or two later by one of my intelli• gent children, 'Daddy, the English always win, don't they?,' gave a clue to the temper of the times. I gave an evasive answer. For one thing, I am not English. But what the Diaries brought back to me most vividly were the rumours. It is entertain- ing and comforting to remember what things were believed. A friend of mine of the most hard-headed Caledonian type believed the story he had been told that a sergeant had discovered a way of putting a rifle shot into the tracks of German tanks and immobilising them. He also reported that another NCO had discovered that you could put plates lifted from neigh- bouring houses on the road and the Germans thought this was a new secret weapon and stopped. None of these stories was very com- forting, but it is perhaps worth noting that all the ingenuity of these times was attributed to Ncos and privates; none was attributed to the officer class.
How far this was a result of experiences in the brief campaign of 1940 or their fathers' reminiscences of what had happened in the First World War, I do not know, but I think one of the sources of the Labour party success in 1945 was a very widespread belief that our traditional rulers had not been up to the job. Only Lord Montgomery became anything of a national hero and that was, I think, largely because he was notorious for the care with which he refused to be a dashing general and to expend the lives of his men in bold and brilliant movements. It is perhaps worth re- membering that the most popular general of the army of North Virginia was neither Lee nor Stonewall Jackson, but General Long- street, who was a very cautious general indeed.
The rumours took all forms. People expected an immediate American intervention, which I was forced to say was quite out of the question. The late Hugh Dalton thought it would be quite easy `to set Europe on fire'; it was not, as most of Europe thought we had lost the war. Others could not believe that the Soviets would let us down, although in fact they had let us down already. Others believed—and I was among them—that sooner or later the United States would come into the war, but would come in later—possibly too late to be helpful to us. I also put a good deal of hope in German folly, and in this I was right.
Yet, like Waterloo, it was a damn close run thing. It was no wonder that tempers got frayed in London, that hopes and fears oscillated from day to day, and that one could believe almost anything. One could, for I believed completely a story which I had mytelf invented, and this showed what an admirable story it was, since when it came back from our man in Basle (called, I think, Ashenden) I believed corn-
pletely in a fiction which I had launched on the waves until a' colleague (who was later an ambassador and has now been exalted even higher as a Governor of the Bac) reminded me of its origin.
Harold Nicolson discusses his views of General de Gaulle. He didn't like the General; not many people did. But he had enough sense to see that the General was, increasingly, the embodiment of the hopes of France. This might be regrettable, but it was a fact. Perhaps his kindness of heart prevented Harold Nicolson from noticing the whirlpools of intrigue that went on in French circles during the exile Some of the most attractive and some of the least attractive examples of the French tem- perament were on show in London. A great deal of the hostility which grew against General de Gaulle and his staff came from the very slow realisation by some very clever French. men in London that the General was quite as clever as they were, and indeed a great deal cleverer.
I had one example of the rage with which the ascendancy of de Gaulle was resented which involved Harold Nicolson, myself, and Wilson Harris, then editor of the SPECTATOR. walked into the Reform Club a month before D-Day and ran into Wilson Harris, who said, 'Come in and join us. I am giving dinner to some French people here, and Harold Nicol- son is coming along.' I found a group of Frenchmen, all of whom I knew; one or two I knew very well. The ablest of these was a normalien suffering from that great normalien vice, an agony of political ambition. It would be unkind to say that he was animated simply by what was called under Louis-Philippe the passion for le portefeuille. But it was a kind of Venus toute entiere whidh accounted for the violence of his denunciation of the General. I and Harold Nicolson listened in silence for twenty minutes or so, and then I turned to the orator: 'You should remember that it is thanks to the lead given by General de Gaulle that you were not interned in 1940? Harold Nicol- son, who had not said a word, chimed in, 'I entirely agree with Brogan.'
The repeated discussions of the role of the exiled French and of the General in the Diaries brought back to me the memory of one of the most alarming dinners I attended in London during that time. I was suddenly summoned to the Connaught Hotel to dine with the General and found a very eminent French- man who had just escaped from France, tuo or three of the closest intimates of the General, and the Then British ambassador in Chungking, the future Lord Inverchapel. The French diplo- mat and Archie Clark Kerr were old friends. They began talking the higher gossip of the carriere, and one extremely entertaining and scabrous story was developed beautifully by Archie Clark Kerr.
Suddenly a voice from heaven was heard. `Monsieur l'ambassadeur, at a moment when your country is occupied and degraded, you have nothing better to do than discuss scabrous stories with Anglo-Saxons!' (Neither I nor the future Lord Inverchapel could be rightly classi- fied as Anglo-Saxons, but we represented the whole English-speaking world.) It was the first time I had heard the General use the word 'Anglo-Saxons,' and Queen Victoria had nothing on the General for not being amused. As quickly as we could, we slunk out of the Connaught, and those who knew him will admit that it was very hard to make Archie Clark Kerr slink out of anywhere; but the General managed it on that occasion.
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