It is a healthy habit to forget when one was
right and to remember carefully those frequent occasions when one's opinion has been falsified by events. I have been re-reading this week my diary for 1940, and especially those detailed passages which record a visit to France in the spring of that tremendous year, which seems today some fifty years ago. I was speaking about Britain's war effort to provincial audiences, and from Paris I went to Chalons, Beaune, Grenoble, Lyons and Besancon. My audiences were numerous and friendly ; I talked to journalists, professors, students, generals, bishops, deputies, business men, prefects, wine-merchants, flower-sellers and hotel-porters ; I returned to London convinced that, what- ever might be the feeble fears of the Paris elite, the provinces were united and resolute. It is only in searching my memory that I can unearth slight symptoms of the malady which but a few weeks later drowned the soul of France.
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