Extract from Warnings and Predictions by Viscount Rothermere (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1939)
Chapters 6 – 16, pp. 75 – 222 (end of book)

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN the various letters and articles from which I have quoted were written and published, my gloomy prognostications about the coming change in the diplomatic and military status of Britain and Germany were ridiculed.

The German declaration of rearmament in the teeth of the Treaty of Versailles, the re-entry into the Rhinelands, the re-nationalisation of German waterways were treated by Ministers of State and members of the public with extraordinary complacency. Not until Signor Mussolini had shaken all confidence in 'collective security' and Herr Hitler had attached to the Reich both Austria and a large part of Czecho-Slovakia, and had threatened the British Empire with war in the process, did my prophecies of 1933 and 1934 cease to be derided.

When Herr Hitler took open power in the January of 1933, I realised that his psychology was very different from that of our own statesmen and very different from that of the men who had led the German republic.

Here was a man whose life had been hard. In boyhood and youth he had been poor and thwarted. In early manhood he had been a serving soldier performing the most dangerous of front-line tasks, those of a battalion runner. He had been decorated for gallantry, had been wounded and gassed. In the years of later manhood he, with other ex-servicemen, had seen his country thrust down into the very mud of world disrepute. He had suffered from the ineptitude of those charged with the Government of his country. He had been affronted by the spectacle of members of an alien race flourishing in Germany and Austria while his own countrymen were in penury. He had attained power only by the use of force combined with a new application of rhetorical and propagandist powers.

This man, I knew, would not consent to wait patiently upon the whims and ideologies of Geneva for the restoration to his country of what he thought were her national rights. The redress of injustices would not be, for him, a matter of dancing attendance cap in hand, as Bruning had done, at Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay.

Since he had from the beginning of his perilous political career denounced any loyalty to the forced Treaty of Versailles, I knew that no paper bond would withhold him, and his equally resolute and bitter comrades, from giving Germany back her arms and restoring that high military moral which had made her so formidable before and during the last war.

At the moment of his accession Britain and her Allies had alternatives before them. They could have armed strongly and rapidly and so have overawed the new Germany. They could have recognised the portent of Hitler, and with frank goodwill have endeavoured to give his country that redress which he sought, and which he had promised to his followers.

They did neither. Britain remained indolent about her arms, and at the same time treated the Hitler regime to exhibitions of scorn in its early days and vituperation and denunciation in its later days. The British policy seemed to combine a determination not to provide adequate means of war while taking every pains to provoke it.

Could there be folly more stupendous!

Britain's task, then, was twofold. She had to rearm rapidly against possible attack from exasperated and well-armed neighbours. She had, at the same time, to try to understand those neighbours and endeavour to co-operate with them in removing all causes of conflict.

By one section of the community one part of this policy was called "war-mongering," and the other part was called "pro-Nazism." Both parts were in reality a policy of Peace.

While Germany was actually getting into her first swing of rearmament, the "disarmament" section of the British public was growing more than ever vocal.

Germany, with justice, felt that she had been tricked at Versailles. She had been forcibly disarmed on the pretext that this was the first step towards world disarmament. Britain, it is true, was equally duped. She did enter upon fifteen fateful years of disarming. But France from the very days the various peace treaties were signed encouraged a mass of small States to arm vigorously. The result was that Germany five years after Versailles found round her a stouter ring of steel than that around her five years before the Great War.

It was inevitable that any German regime which denounced the diktat of Versailles would arm heavily at the first chance. It was obvious that their arms must be—diplomatically if not actually—directed against the Versailles Powers. With these things in mind, one could only see the British "disarmament-pacifist" school as a kind of national suicide club. That was how I saw it.

I wrote in The Daily Mail of November 17th 1933 this article:

THE PERILS OF PINHEAD PACIFISM.

"Emboldened by their illusion that this country is safe from foreign attack, ignorant and self-satisfied agitators are clamouring for the British Government to continue its dangerous policy of disarmament.

"They cling to the imbecile belief that war, which has existed since humanity began, and looms so largely on the international horizon to-day, can be prevented by pacifist 'gestures.' They might just as sensibly try to pacify a Bengal tiger by blowing kisses to it.

"Two kinds of people are prominent in this agitation. One is drawn from those intellectual prigs whose overweening conceit in their own wisdom and virtue is equalled only by their blindness to hard facts. The other consists of their well-meaning but sentimental and simple dupes.

"These noisy and misguided zealots start with a false assumption that those who realise more clearly than they the danger in which this country stands are animated by some sinister desire for another war. They like to feel that they are crusaders against the powers of darkness. They adopt towards the question of national defence the attitude that is known in America as 'holier-than-thou.'

"If their knowledge of history and present-day international politics were a little less elementary, they would realise that the opponents of premature disarmament are working for the very aim which they themselves profess—the preservation of world-peace. The further reduction of British forces, 'as an example to the rest of the world,' will no more achieve this end than the disbandment of the London police would abolish crime in the metropolis. The truth is just the contrary. Disarmament means war.

"Our pinhead pacifists, on the other hand, are constantly working up that kind of spirit between the nations of Europe which is liable to culminate in conflict. Their reckless insults to the rulers of Germany, their insolent criticism of matters which are purely the private concern of the German people, will end inevitably, if they are not stopped, in raising the resentment of that country to explosion point.

"Should such grotesque and impudent tomfoolery as the 'trial' of the Reichstag Fire case recently organised in London by the 'World Committee on German Fascism' ever be repeated when Germany has recovered her military strength, it might well be made a pretext for war by that proud and susceptible nation.

"These self-appointed mentors of Germany forget that men like Hitler and General Goering, to whom they address their rebukes and remonstrances, are fighters and ruthless patriots. They have proved their soldierly qualities in actual war. Such men are not to be turned from their purposes by a barrage of mere words. Those purposes they have proclaimed to be peaceful. Our pacifists should beware lest Germany grows strong again, and their constant scolding changes that intention.

"We who live in Britain know how negligible the hysterical screamers who rant in the Albert Hall about alleged German outrages or at the Oxford Union about disarmament really are. Outside this country, however, they produce an effect out of all proportion to their insignificance. In an Empire like ours, which has charge of many native races still in a backward state of civilisation, and which marches, on the North-West Frontier of India and elsewhere, with warlike races envious of our possessions, it is perilous folly to allow a morbid and anaemic minority of our population to spread the impression that Britain has lost her virility and self-respect.

"The British public treats its puling pacifists with characteristic tolerance and contempt. We know that the Oxford undergraduates who vote against fighting for King and country and flaunt white feathers in their buttonholes are little more than excited schoolboys showing off to the public. If the need for their services were ever to arise, 90 per cent. of them would come forward as eagerly as their predecessors did nineteen years ago. But, trivial as these demonstrations are, we must not forget that they do incalculable harm to British prestige abroad, and encourage all the latent hostilities which surround our Empire.

"'Be strong. Strength means peace,' said Marshal Lyautey last Monday to the French Boy Scouts at Strasbourg.

"In contacts that I have had with masters at some of our great Public Schools and with the younger dons at the Universities, I have not infrequently been struck by the defeatist and drawing-room Bolshevist views that they express. Though these may only be part of a pose intended to convey an impression of intellectual superiority, it is regrettable that the men who are charged with the education of British youth should profess such unworthy opinions. Most of them owe their bread and butter to the wealth accumulated in the past through the expansion of the Empire they affect to despise.

"Although in this country we dislike the idea of inquiring into a man's political opinions, those who have the appointment of the instructors of the younger generation should insist that their influence shall be used to encourage ideals of good citizenship, and not the perverted and pernicious theories of a false internationalism.

"Much less tolerance can be shown to newspapers which, while making pretentious claims to national responsibility, encourage these dangerous habits of thought. A year or two ago the same organs were fawning upon the anti-British agitator Gandhi. Now that this vain mountebank is discredited, even with his own credulous followers, they are employing their mischievous activities in baiting Germany, and with quite unconscious inconsistency, bleating for a further weakening of Britain's powers of self-defence.

"The fact recorded by the military historian Tacitus 1,800 years ago still holds good, that 'the peace of nations cannot be secured without arms.'

"Defencelessness against air attack is a direct incitement to the aggression of more energetic Powers. If the risks we are at present running were properly understood, there would be such a peremptory national demand for an adequate British Air Force as no Government could resist.

"Is it realised that our present inferiority lays open such densely populated areas as Tyneside—that great centre of Socialist pacifism—to the possibility of complete destruction, with immense loss of human life, in the course of a single summer evening by aeroplanes already in the possession of Germany?

"The fastest type of German commercial aircraft is known as the Heinkel 70, and is capable of being transformed in a few hours into a bombing machine. Quite recently one of these aeroplanes flew from Berlin to Seville—1,832 miles—in eight hours, and at an average of about 230 miles an hour. From Hamburg to Newcastle-on-Tyne is only 422 miles, so that it would be perfectly possible for a squadron of Heinkel bombers to make two raids on Tyneside from Germany within eight hours, at a speed which would enable them to leave far behind the few 'interceptor fighters' of our insignificant Home Defence Air Force, whose maximum speed is given as only 207 miles an hour.

"That is one of the plain facts which have completely altered the whole situation of this country as regards national defence. Our duty is to face these facts.

"Let us put aside sloppy sentimentalism and the vain illusion that for the first time in man's long history human nature has finally forsaken war. The day for beating the sword into the ploughshare has not yet come.

"Until it does we must pay heed to the precept implied in the motto of the Honourable Artillery Company—that fine corps of young Londoners who set so splendid an example to our neurotic pacifist youth. It reads: 'Arma paces fulcra—Arms are the basis of Peace.'"

The pinhead pacifists against whom nearly six years ago I was writing are still with us. They have learnt nothing.

For some years I was a Governor of a certain school in London. During the rearmament campaign, when the Government had at long last begun to speak of the danger to Britain of inadequate defences, I offered to pay for the equipment for this school of a Cadet Corps. The reception of my offer will be deduced from the following letter that I felt compelled to write to the headmaster last year:

April 6th 1938.

"DEAR SIR,

"I note that the L.C.C. has once more refused to allow any of the schools under its control to establish a cadet corps.

"With the views that I hold it is impossible for me to be associated with a school or any other educational body which has not, as one of its primary purposes, the wish and the will to help in every possible way the cause of national defence.

"Will you, therefore, kindly record my resignation as a Governor of the St. Marylebone Grammar School?" In taking this action, I do so with much regret,

"Yours very faithfully,

"ROTHERMERE."

Not only are these Pinheads still with us, and still in control of many of our local governing bodies, but they still try to perform their second deadly function of

". . . working up that kind of spirit between the nations of Europe which is liable to culminate in conflict. Their reckless insults to the rulers of Germany, their insolent criticism of matters which are purely the private concern of the German people, will end inevitably, if they are not stopped, in raising the resentment of that country to explosion point."

It is not uncommon to find in the Left-wing Press references to Herr Hitler's "lunacy" and his "illusion of grandeur."

In what does this fancied lunacy and illusion of grandeur consist? In the fact that Herr Hitler and his immediate colleagues have raised Germany from the poverty, ignominy and disruption in which they found her in 1933 to a position of European dominance? In the fact that instead of some 67,000,000 impoverished Germans occupying 183,381 square miles there are now over 79,000,000 Germans occupying without unemployment 127,750 square miles. In the fact that Germany from the disgrace of defeat in 1918 had risen to a commanding position in the councils of the world in 1938, with the Treaty that bound her to degradation torn up for ever.

Britain may not like this change. Few English-men ousted from their own old command of world affairs can like it. But it is the very antithesis of lunacy. It is no illusion of grandeur. It is grandeur. It is like saying that some heavy-weight boxer who has got himself into perfect form has an illusion of grandeur when he knocks over the ropes some blustering antagonist who has allowed himself to grow stale.

It would certainly be the height of suicidal mania to tell such a heavy-weight that he had attained to his status by the simple process of being a certifiable lunatic with an illusion of grandeur if oneself were without any means of self-defence.

If there has been any certifiable lunacy anywhere in Europe, it has surely been among those who have steadily deprived themselves of arms as a preliminary to taunting with the grossest insults well-armed men who already feel themselves deeply wronged.

One thing is quite certain—that if any portion of the pictorial and written abuse which has been directed at the heads of the German and Italian States had been levelled, let us say, against President Roosevelt, the most immediate diplomatic retaliation would have been suffered by Britain.

The habit of jeering at and reviling these heads of other nations was acquired when both Italy and Germany were still weak, or supposed to be still weak. It is a legacy of the early days when Herr Hitler was mistaken by our ignorant and naive publicists for a political Charlie Chaplin, and Signor Mussolini was supposed to be a kind of comic opera clown. It was ill mannered then: it is both ill mannered and dangerous now.

This misconception was at its height in 1935, when Signor Mussolini, despairing of any results from appeals to Geneva, launched his Abyssinian campaign.

This campaign was a perfect demonstration of the inability of those in command of our Foreign Office and intelligence departments to grasp elementary facts and to draw from them simple conclusions. As such it deserves separate attention.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE Italo-Ethiopian campaign was responsible for more confusion of thought in Britain than any other episode in living memory.

It gave rise to the extraordinary spectacle of Arch-bishops and Bishops rallying together to harangue masses of ignorant sentimentalists in support of the most notorious nation of brutal slave-traders in the world.

It showed a British Cabinet vainly trying to harness the non-existent—or, at least, non-responsive—forces of the League of Nations in defence of a nation against whose admission to that very League Britain had herself protested on the score that it was a barbaric conglomeration of tribes whose nominal head was in no position to fulfil his obligations.

It showed, indeed, many another anomaly of which history will take satirical account.

At the outset of the episode there were clearly two separate considerations involved. One was where justice might lie in the prolonged dispute that had come to the arbitrament of arms. The other was whether Italy was able to beat the Abyssinians.

Both of these were widely discussed at that time. With the first I shall deal, briefly, a little later in these pages. The second now seems such a palpable absurdity that it is hard to recapture the angry moods of 1935, when the public believed with great military "experts" and statesmen that the best for which Signor Mussolini might hope was a long, dragging, four-year campaign, and that the most likely result would be that the Italian legions would be "bogged" in Ethiopian swamps, drowned by the much threatened rains, and finally massacred by the "righteous" hordes of the Negus.

My own conviction and prediction, published through The Daily Mail, was that Italy would defeat the Abyssinians within half a year.

The actual campaign in Ethiopia did not begin until the summer of 1935, after the diplomatic breakdown in August following the abortive meeting of the League Council in July. To a mind not blinded by "wishful-thinking" it was obvious from the beginning of the year that conflict must come. From the early spring I saw to it that the newspapers associated with my name did not leave their readers under the happy illusion that Italy could be bluffed out of Abyssinia, or that, once in that country, she would be very long withheld from a decisive conquest.

Even as late as the September a New Statesman pamphlet on Abyssinia gravely said:

"The duration of the war is reckoned by Italian military experts at two years: by most foreign experts at at least four years, followed by guerrilla fighting for an indefinite period."

A very celebrated General who had been out with the Italian army as an observer submitted to me, in the middle of the campaign, a lengthy memorandum conclusively proving that Italy was doomed to defeat by Abyssinian conditions, and later demonstrated to me and a number of guests round my table that in such a country the aeroplane and the tank must be ineffective instruments.

The reasoning behind my conviction that Italy must win, and win soon, was simple. Signor Mussolini had raised a highly efficient technical army. He had thoroughly prepared for the virtually inevitable war. Facing his troops, with their modern aeroplanes, light tanks, tractors and lorries, would be masses of ill-disciplined, ill-trained, unshod, ignorant, savage warriors. If the bombers could not, because of the formation of the rocky, mountainous country, reach their maximum effect on human targets, they would certainly play havoc with the herds upon which so many of the Ethiopian tribesmen depended for food.

There was also a moral factor, and, on the much-quoted adage of Napoleon, in war the moral to the physical is as three is to one. Italy was a rejuvenated and unified nation, burning to avenge the unspeakable atrocities which the Abyssinians had inflicted upon her soldiers at Adowa some forty years earlier. Her troops were anxious to display their prowess and endurance to the Duce. The Abyssinians, on the contrary, were a loose conglomeration of tribes, many of them in perpetual half-rebellion against the nominal "Emperor," who was, by many of them, regarded as a murderous usurper.

Many of those who regarded my forecast of a short campaign as unsound were undoubtedly affected by their belief, or hope, that Italy would not be permitted by other Powers to make a conquest. Here, again, there were two considerations involved. One was whether other Powers had a right to take measures against Italy. The other was, if they had that right, had they adequate means. The British Government, as represented by Mr. Eden, strove to establish the right, and failed most ignominiously to find the means.

For some reason the British public in 1935 were allowed to believe that after the Walwal incident, Signor Mussolini moved troops to Abyssinia and began an aggressive war, in the face of any obligation Italy might have under the Covenant of the League, which is, as is well known, the first part of the Treaty of Versailles, which Italy as a victor had signed. The calendar of events tells a very different story. The Walwal incident took place on December 5th 1934. It was virtually a year before the League of Nations reported upon it. Over eight months passed before the actual war began. It was not Abyssinia, but Italy, whose nationals had been wantonly attacked, which was the original aggrieved party to the dispute. Ten years earlier Britain had sought Italian support in a project to build a barrage on the Abyssinian Lake Tana, offering in return to support an Italian claim to a railway through that same country; Abyssinia had referred the British proposal to the League of Nations, and Britain had immediately whittled down the project to escape the consideration of Geneva. At a Conference held at Stresa, Mr. MacDonald had abstained from even warning the Italians that strong action in Abyssinia over the repeated attacks by the tribesmen would be regarded seriously by Britain. Italy had thus been led to expect that, just as the Lake Tana and Gondar incidents had been settled without recourse to the League, so the Walwal incident could be settled.

It was, in view of these things, quite a rational assumption by Italy that if the other Powers thought they had a theoretic right of interference, they had tacitly by their own conduct voided it.

For Great Britain, who had wilfully reduced her arms for fifteen years, the second consideration was the more important. Even if there was a right to take measures against Italy, was there the means?

Pinhead pacifists had screamed for more and more reductions in arms. Their screamings had been listened to with full attention. The only means of taking measures against Italy lay in what was optimistically known as 'collective security.' In hard fact 'collective security' meant this: there were represented at Geneva a number of small nations led in their deliberations by Russia, France and Britain. Outside Geneva, and antagonistic to the League, stood Japan and Germany, both heavily armed, and the United States, sworn to a policy of 'neutrality' which meant a policy of non-intervention in European affairs. Italy was technically a member of the League, but was in revolt against it. Against a well-armed group, consisting of Japan, Germany and Italy, it was thus proposed to mobilise, for either economic or military force, a jumble of small States many of whom were the friends and clients of Germany; France, which was in the first throes of economic difficulty and apparent political disruption; Russia, whose strength was doubtful and whose own solidity was questionable; and Britain, whose arms had been reduced to futility and whose economic recovery from a major slump was capable of setback by almost any interruption to world trade.

In addition to these material factors was the moral factor that Britain and France had been taught to regard war as 'unthinkable' after the war to end war. Italy and Germany had been re-taught the lessons of an earlier generation. They believed with Napoleon that God is on the side of the big battalions. They believed with Caesar's legions that it is sweet and glorious to die for one's country. The so-called Democratic States had been rendered soft-fibred. The Dictatorships were high-mettled.

To ignore these things was not patriotic or brave, but merely foolish. To recognise them was not unpatriotic or defeatist, but the necessary result of honestly facing facts and their implication. If there were any lack of patriotism it was in those who, knowing the truth, endeavoured to direct Britain into a policy which the truth stamped as fatuous at best and fatal at worst.

The world had already had one or two pitiable exhibitions of how impotent was the truncated League of Nations in the face of nations able to fight and intent upon pursuing their own will. It had not been able to prevent or punish Germany for putting a new Jack-boot through the Treaty of Versailles. It had not been able to prevent China's invasion by Japan. It had not even been able to prevent two South American Republics, of no size or genuine world importance, from conducting a long-dragging war.

There was no reason whatsover [sic] for supposing that, having failed in these tests, the League would miraculously be able to apply pressure to Italy and bring her to subjection to the Genevan ideology, particularly as Italy could well count upon the aid of Germany and Japan, and would be able to import from the American Continent. It was distressing to men of high pacific ideals that this should be so, but it was so.

On the grounds that I have just set out as briefly as possible, I concluded that any attempt to impose Sanctions on Italy must fail. I saw also, very vividly, that such an attempt would expose to the world the terrible fact that Britain, whose word had once been decisive in European politics, was no longer the arbiter of conduct. For Italy to laugh at a menace inspired by Britain would be fatal to our prestige and of enormous encouragement to the Totalitarian States. Sanctions would bitterly offend Italy, a nation which had been one of our stoutest Allies. They would complete the work of disrupting the old Allies of the Great War, that disruptive process which began when Japan had been similarly antagonised.

Because of these convictions, the papers whose policies I directed were from the first strongly against the whole policy of Sanctions. They applauded the present Premier, Mr. Chamberlain, when he called that policy the very midsummer of madness. They preached from the very start of the conflict that truth which Mr. Eden himself eventually had to formulate towards the end of the sorry episode—that there are only two kinds of Sanctions, the ineffective economic sanctions that are not worth putting on, and the military sanctions which must mean war.

Every prediction I made, every warning I uttered about Sanctions proved one hundred per cent. right. Italy did laugh at them, and proceeded in a very few months to roll up the Abyssinian resistance. The weakness of Britain was exposed. Italy, affronted by her old Ally, formed with Germany the Rome–Berlin axis, which speedily became the Rome–Berlin–Tokio axis. Seeing Britain's wishes set at naught, smaller communities took their tone from Italy in 1935, so that even the insurgent General Franco, to whom Britain refused belligerent rights, was encouraged to treat British diplomatic queries and rebukes with open contempt. Seeing Britain's prestige so low, Japan in 1937 and 1938 treated British protests and British representatives and British troops and the British flag with arrogance, contumely and contempt.

"But yesterday the word of Caesar might have stood against the world: now . . . none so poor to do him reverence." That was the only fitting inscription for the doors of the British Foreign Office after the policy of Sanctions had been launched and had failed.

I say again that British policy at the time of the Abyssinian campaign was politically a blunder of the worst possible kind, and was morally a mistake which is already having the most devastating effects upon the future of the race.

Our unworthy association with Communist Russia and what—under politicians like M. Blum—looked like a half-Communist France on behalf of the barbaric slave-traders of Ethiopia set us in opposition to the very nation from which the whole culture of Christendom was derived. Italy, the cradle of the arts and the home of the Church when both arts and the Church were most imperilled, was affronted and antagonised, while the Godless murderers of Moscow and the torturing tribesmen of Abyssinia were exalted as our chosen friends. Why? Because Italy had appealed to force? Had neither Moscow nor Addis-Ababa used force? Because Italy was supposed to have broken a treaty? Had not Britain and France broken more than one treaty with Italy?

It was incredible to me then, and it is appalling to me now, that for such unworthy objects we should have sacrificed the good-will of such a friend.

Sacrifice that friend we did. The British representatives at Geneva decided we had a right to try to intimidate or force Italy out of Abyssinia. The degrading spectacle was seen of British Ministers and their staffs touting and bribing small States for their support, one of the most discreditable episodes in history. Sanctions, under British leadership, and with French reluctance, were applied to Italy—and with their failure there failed also Britain's century-old command of world confidence and respect. For in blustering at Italy without the power to change her course, we had encouraged the Emperor of Abyssinia and his wretched people to prolong a hopeless resistance.

The poor little betrayed Negus was not to be the last of the victims of the sentimentalists' demand that Britain should be at once provocative and insolent. Abyssinia was not to be the last occasion when Britain nagged the strong without the power to check them and encouraged the weak without the power to help them. Dr. Schuschnigg and Dr. Benes were each in turn to discover what was the practical worth of the verbal encouragement given to them by British sentimentalists whose fondness for railing at strongly armed Powers was only equalled by their objection to being themselves armed.

It looks as if General Chiang Kai-shek before long will join Dr. Schuschnigg and Dr. Benes as the dupe of a sentimental but impotent British foreign policy.

It is strange how many of our most vocal sentimentalists feed themselves upon illusion, which must have proved in the last few years a most unsatisfactory diet.

The same people who predicted that Italy would be ruined by her campaign in Abyssinia, and prophesied that the independence of Austria would be maintained, and said that the forces of Czecho-Slovakia would intimidate and over-awe Germany, are now nursing the strange illusion that the war in China is gradually destroying and absorbing the forces of Japan. Actually, Japan occupies the principal rivers and cities of China, and I predict with every confidence that Japan will have concluded a successful war before the end of the present year.

The fiasco of Sanctions, against which, both before and during their imposition, I perpetually warned my fellow-countrymen, had the dire effects I predicted. The possibility of such a blunder in foreign policy lay in the very weakness to the exposure of which I have devoted the earlier chapters of this book—the weakness of under-rating the Totalitarian States. The strength and determination of Signor Mussolini were under-rated, just as the strength and determination of Herr Hitler had been—and are—persistently under-rated.

Even after Munich many people in Great Britain thought, and were allowed to think, that Herr Hitler had been bluffing—Hitler, the master of countless legions and the head of the greatest armed force the world has yet known. This harping on the comforting word "bluff" after Munich is the more peculiar and depressing because Herr Hitler in August 1938 put his cards on the table—for the honour of Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary he displayed to his guest, and the world, new kinds of arms of which other States had no conception. When the advisers of our Foreign Office were saying that he had no real strength behind him, he obligingly displayed both quantity and quality of armed strength, just as at Nuremberg he had displayed a national fitness and unity to the news-cameras of the world.

The failure of the British statesmen and their expert advisers rightly to assess the weight and power of Germany and Italy has caused British foreign policy to present a picture of complete disarray and confusion. Despite a wise change of direction given to it within the last year, thanks to our great Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, it is still full of explosive possibilities.

The basis of all policy, as of all strategy, must be information. Had the British Cabinet between 1933 and 1938 been supplied with accurate information and wise advice by those serving them abroad it would have been impossible for such colossal misjudgments to be made.

Too often are wrong appointments made in London to Embassies and Legations abroad. It has been the experience of all knowledgeable travellers to meet British Ministers obviously unfitted for and unsuited to their posts. Many are men who pursue a small social life in the Capital to which they are accredited, shutting themselves off from any personal contact with the political realities of the country.

Occasionally, it cannot be doubted, a man who insists upon sending home news and views which do not support the predilictions of his 'Chief' is translated to some other post in some other land, to make room for a more somnolent or sycophantic representative.

I have called the Abyssinian campaign a perfect demonstration of the inability of those in command of our Foreign Office and intelligence services to grasp elementary facts and draw from them simple conclusions. It was a perfect demonstration, but by no means an isolated one. Our attitude towards the Sudeten German problem in Czecho-Slovakia was such another.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN 1927 I launched a campaign to secure for Hungary redress of the grievances which she suffered at the end of the Great War.

Hungary's position among the group of combatants known as the Central Empires was peculiar. Her great patriot-statesman, Count Tisza, had been against the Austrian attack in 1914 on Serbia, which he insisted must mean a world war. Throughout that war Hungary had combined a gallantry in action with an equal gallantry behind the lines. No Englishman or woman was interned in that country. Her treatment of prisoners was exemplary. Her fate was to see great sections of her historic lands rent from her and many hundreds of thousands of her proud Magyar race placed under the heels of far inferior peoples.

In 1927 I wrote:

Budapest. June 11.

"Eastern Europe is strewn with Alsace-Lorraines. By severing from France the twin provinces of that name, the Treaty of Frankfort in 1871 made another European war inevitable. The same blunder has been committed on a larger scale in the Peace Treaties which divided up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. They have created dissatisfied racial minorities in half a dozen parts of Central Europe, any one of which may be the starting-point of another conflagration.

"Of the three treaties which rearranged the map of Central Europe, the last and most ill-advised was that of Trianon, which Hungary was called upon to sign on June 4th 1920. Instead of simplifying the network of nationalities existing there it entangled them still further. So deep is the discontent it has created that every impartial traveller in that part of the Continent sees plainly the need for repairing the mistakes committed.

"As they now run, the frontiers of the new Central European States are arbitrary and uneconomic. But they have a more serious aspect still. Their injustice is a standing danger to the peace of Europe. . . .

"The hands that imposed the political conditions now existing there sowed the seeds of future war. . . . We ought to root up all the dry grass and dead timber of the Treaty of Trianon before some chance spark sets fire to it. Once the conflagration has started it will be too late."

("Hungary's Place in the Sun," Daily Mail.)

So impressed was I by my investigations into the political situation during my visit to Hungary in that year, that on my return to London I again ventilated my views. The second article appeared on August 30th 1927 and—even now that events and the map have changed—is perhaps worth reprinting here in its entirety. I said then what the British people should have been told by their leaders in 1938, and what I was to repeat unavailingly during the years between. Had the predictions I made then, twelve years ago, been heeded, the crisis in 1938 could not have arisen. The relations of the European Powers would have been smoother, and what was at one time known as the Locarno spirit might have replaced the bitter and strained feeling that caused Mr. Chamberlain to take his hasty journeys by air to see the German Leader.

This was the article:

EUROPE'S POWDER MAGAZINE
GROSS INJUSTICES MAKING FOR WAR

"Paramount with the Allies during the Great War was the desire that when peace came it should be permanent. Whatever else victory might bring, the men and women of the Allied nations wanted to ensure that there should be no more Alsace-Lorraines to keep the war-spirit smouldering.

"It was the professed aim of the Peace Conference, when it gathered in Paris in 1919, to rearrange the map of Europe on a basis of self-determination. But as its work went on this principle faded from sight. The result has been that Central Europe to-day is piled high with the materials of a new conflagration. The primary cause of this is the partitioning of the Hungarian nation among its neighbours by the Treaty of Trianon, imposed upon Hungary in June 1920, which transferred—in compact masses contiguous with the main body of the Hungarian people—600,000 Hungarians to Rumania (out of a total of 1,750,000, most of whom are intermingled with the Rumanians), 1,000,000 to Czecho-Slovakia, and 400,000 to Jugo-Slavia.

"In the Peace Treaty made with Germany the principle of self-determination was so thoroughly applied that a plebiscite was even held in Schleswig to revive the frontier which the Prussians had imposed upon the Danes in 1864. But with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles the principal Allied statesmen relaxed their efforts. The task of settling with their chief enemy had been a prodigious one. Their powers of personal application were exhausted. The affairs of their own countries urgently claimed their attention. The drafting of peace terms with Germany's minor allies seemed to them a secondary matter which they might well leave to the subordinate members of their delegations.

"For similar reasons the world's interest in peace-making evaporated, and the light of publicity which had been concentrated on the work of the Conference was withdrawn. In reality only half the work of restoring a lasting peace to Europe had been performed. But the importance of what yet remained to be done was overshadowed by the achievement already accomplished, and the remaining treaties were left to be drafted behind closed doors and signed amid general indifference many months later in various suburbs of Paris.

"This negligent procedure suited very well the intrigues of various minor nationalities which had come to be associated with the Allied cause, and which stood to profit considerably from the settlements thus obscurely made.

"Representatives of these new-fangled nationalities immediately began to arrive in large numbers in Paris, where, with the aid of certain doctrinaire pamphleteers of Allied nationality, they set themselves to pull every available string to ensure that the particular peace treaty affecting their own small State should be as profitable as possible to their public and private interests. This was how grave abuses, containing the sure seed of future wars, crept into the Central European peace settlement.

"These abuses were committed in the name of self-determination. If that principle had been strictly observed all round, there would have been no cause for complaint. But the creation of Czecho-Slovakia was an artificial operation only carried through by out-raging the principle of nationality which it was supposed to serve. There never had been a state or nation of Czecho-Slovakia, although in the Middle Ages there had existed a Kingdom of Bohemia whose independence ended in 1620, and whose last Queen was a British Princess, Elizabeth, daughter of James I. The frontiers of this State, however, had no resemblance to the post-war creation of Czecho-Slovakia.

"The Union of the Czechs with the Slovaks had been brought about only as the result of a meeting held at Pittsburg, U.S.A., during the war, at which the Slovaks, upon a pledge of autonomous home-rule for their people in any future Czecho-Slovak State that might be formed, agreed to support the demands of the Czechs when a Peace Conference should assemble. The conditions of this pledge, like those of the subsequent Treaty of Trianon, have not been carried out by the present Czecho-Slovak Government, with the result that bitter recriminations are now being exchanged between the two chief racial sections of the new republic.

"To find territory for this hybrid State, the Peace Delegates at Paris were reduced to expedients in direct conflict with their proclaimed principle of self-determination. Not only were 3,000,000 Austro-Germans incorporated in it, but its borders were extended to the south by the inclusion of a compact mass of 1,000,000 Hungarians of entirely different race and language from the Czechs. These people and the Hungarian Delegation at the Peace Conference protested bitterly but unavailingly against their fate. Its injustice was tacitly admitted by the Allies at the time in a covering letter dealing with the Treaty of Trianon written by M. Millerand, the French Premier, which contained a promise that the frontiers laid down should, if necessary, be revised.

"No sooner had the Czechs got control of the Hungarian population ceded to them than they began to subject it to oppression by the side of which the Germanisation of Alsace-Lorraine pales into insignificance. The Czecho-Slovak Government adopted towards its Hungarian minority population a deliberate policy of expropriation of property, which has continued unchecked up to the present time. The compensation for the seized property was so insignificant that it was virtually confiscated. No financial accounts of this expropriation have ever been published, nor have repeated appeals to the Czech Government resulted in their production. If only half the stories that are told about these land deals are true, the Czech Government is responsible for tolerating some of the worst frauds that have ever taken place in the public life of Europe.

"No heed was paid to the expostulations of the twelve Members of Protest whom this Hungarian minority (despite the dragooning of the electorate by the Government) returns to the Czech Parliament, nor did the injustice done attract any attention elsewhere in Europe. It is only now, when the great Allied nations have more leisure from their own problems, that they are beginning to learn how Czecho-Slovakia and Rumania have twisted and distorted the Treaty of Trianon. By their greed and oppression these two States have created two new Alsace-Lorraines which are nothing less than festering sores in the heart of Europe.

"Such conduct is specially odious in the case of Czecho-Slovakia, for this State is a spoilt child of fortune. Apart from a handful of Czech 'legionaries' who came over to the Allies, the Czechs fought on the side of the Austrians to the last. It was thus a curious freak of fortune which enabled Czecho-Slovakia at the end of the campaign to assume the role of a triumphant conqueror while imposing upon Hungary that of a defenceless victim.

"Czecho-Slovakia owes her independence, in fact, solely to the philanthropy of Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States, and if she has any perception of her own interests she will take care not to lose the goodwill of the peoples of these countries.

"The position of this post-war republic is by no means secure. In domestic affairs the mixed elements of which it is compounded—Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, Moravians, Poles and Ruthenes—are so antagonistic to each other that the disappearance of the State by sudden disintegration from within is always a possibility. In this way she constitutes the powder-magazine of Europe. From the reports in circulation it looks as if anything may happen in Czecho-Slovakia at any time. An overnight revolution might remove her from the map of Europe as an independent State.

"One thing is certain—Czecho-Slovakia cannot continue her present exploitation of her subject populations, whether they be Hungarian, Austro-German or one of the other nationalities. By doing so, she will affront the public opinion of the world, and this is a risk no modern state dare incur.

"The Czecho-Slovak Government must soon take a momentous decision. Will it elect to stand upon evasion and perversion of the Treaty of Trianon, or will it follow counsels of reason and justice by saying to Hungary: 'We do not wish to retain within our frontiers compact blocks of Hungarian population against their will, and we agree to a revision by plebiscite of our frontiers in this respect'?

"If such a rectification could be brought about, I should recommend that Hungary should reimburse Czecho-Slovakia for any money spent since the Treaty of Trianon upon the retroceded territory, and for the loss of employment on the part of Czecho-Slovak public functionaries, but there must be a set off in the shape of adequate compensation to the Hungarian nationals who have been wrongfully dispossessed of their properties.

"The idea of an independent Czecho-Slovakia first reached the minds of the masses of the Western nations through The Daily Mail and its associated newspapers, and I very much doubt whether, except for the publicity thus given, Czecho-Slovakia, as we know it to-day, would have had any existence.

"M. Masaryk, the President of Czecho-Slovakia, was during the war a highly esteemed member of the staff of contributors to these papers. I am convinced that President Masaryk himself is not satisfied with the present position in regard to the Hungarian minorities in his country, for it is stated in this month's Fortnightly Review that in a recent treatise entitled The New Europe he envisages a revision of the present frontiers of Czecho-Slovakia. I cannot do better than quote his exact words. He wrote:

"'The settlement of ethnographic boundaries after the storm of war will possibly be provisional in some cases. As soon as the nations quieten down and accept the principle of self-determination, a rectification of ethnographic boundaries and minorities will be carried out without excitement and with due consideration of all questions involved.'

"I was one of those who welcomed the erection of Czecho-Slovakia into an independent State, and I should be sorry to see that country forfeit the confidence which the Allied nations placed in it. I realise, as every thinking man must, the standing danger to European peace of allowing Czecho-Slovakia to remain an exposed political powder-magazine. Two years ago I decided to draw attention to the perils of the present position, but I then determined to wait until the Treaty of Trianon had been in operation seven full years, so that whatever adjustments were essential could take place in the calm atmosphere of mature reflection.

"I have some hope that the Czecho-Slovaks will see how plainly to their own interest is the course that I recommend. In a large measure their development depends upon foreign financial help. Any international banker will tell them how gravely the risks of their present internal and external position compromise their standing in the money markets of the world. As one who claims some knowledge as an investor, I cannot imagine any securities with less attraction for the well-informed investing public to-day than the State Loans of Czecho-Slovakia and Rumania. The position of both those countries is far too hazardous to appeal to any but the speculative investor seeking a much higher rate of interest even than that which they are now paying. Financial houses of London and New York which handle such loans certainly owe it to their clients to warn them of the grave risks associated with investments in countries which have been endeavouring to incorporate powerful national minorities differing in race, language and often religion. I foresee that in no distant future, if neither of these States takes steps to reduce the grave dangers of trouble both at home and abroad for which their own action is almost entirely responsible, their loans will have no greater value than Russian scrip possesses to-day.

"What I claim for Hungary is no more than elementary justice. The idea of a return to her pre-war frontiers is out of the question. Hungary must pay the penalty of defeat. But that is no reason for inflicting upon her such wrongs as the war was expressly waged to abolish. She has a perfectly righteous and reasonable claim to recover the territories preponderantly inhabited by Hungarians which, as a result of the Treaty of Trianon, are cut off from all intercourse with her by every device that the malevolence of her neighbours can invent.

"This state of things is an outrage to an ancient and splendid people with a history of high endeavour extending over a thousand years. It is fundamentally wrong, and it cannot endure. There is time now to right it peaceably and effectively. If we continue to close our eyes to the evil it will keep alive the spirit of hatred and hostility in Central Europe, with the inevitable result of a disastrous war.

"Are we so blind as to let the elements of another terrible conflict accumulate unchecked? It is the duty of Britain, France and Italy, as the members of the League of Nations primarily responsible for the present situation, to take steps to give Hungary the relief to which she is entitled. Their generosity in this matter will not be abused. They will be dealing with a nation which, though small, has a character and traditions second to none. I repeat that Hungary is the natural ally of Britain, France and Italy in Central Europe. Even during the war she showed her natural good feeling towards Britain and the United States by refusing to intern her British and American residents, who were allowed to continue their usual occupations. She was hardly more than a technical enemy of these two countries and she will make a loyal and reliable friend of whatever nation extends to her a helping hand in her day of emergency and distress."

That article was written eleven years before Herr Hitler's march into Austria and the ceding of Sudetenland cut the tangle. Two years later, on March 26th 1929, I was asked to participate in a discussion organised by The Daily News and Westminster Gazette on 'the next war.' My contribution contained the following passage, which presaged exactly the events of March 1938.

"No observant man can travel through Central Europe to-day, or even study its incoherent political divisions on the map, without realising the recklessness with which real and vital interests were trampled under-foot in making that arbitrary and ill-informed re-distribution of territory.

"All natural principles of frontier delimitation were rejected. The new boundaries had no justification, whether ethnographic, geographic or economic. They set up in Central Europe a permanent condition of inconvenience, friction and discontent which, if it is not remedied, must inevitably lead to another war.

" . . . Serious possibilities of future trouble for Central Europe exist also in that other Peace Treaty of St. Germain by which the territory of Austria was carved up, principally for the benefit of Czecho-Slovakia, in such a way that the great city of Vienna, with two million people, was left practically without national territory to supply its needs or consume its products. . . . The Austrians in despair have come to look to union with Germany as the only remedy for their impossible position. When the attempt to realise that aim is made, Europe will again be brought into close danger of war, as a direct result of lack of elementary foresight in her statesmen."

There were, even then, two sides to the question. There was the repugnance with which great people like the Hungarians saw a million of their fellows under the tyranny of the Czechs and the Austrians saw their ancient capital brought to virtual ruin, and there was also the dislike of a proud people like the Germans for the domination over their national destinies of the conglomerate of small nationalities at Geneva. Of this second aspect I was vividly aware long before Herr Hitler had taken power in Berlin. As early as September 24th 1930, in The Daily Mail, appeared this warning:

"A powerful, highly patriotic people like the German will never be satisfied to leave the attainment of their national ambitions at its (the League of Nation's) mercy.

"It is more likely that when a National Socialist Government arrives in power, Germany, under that party's vigorous leadership, will herself show the way to the immediate redress of the most flagrant injustices.

"In doing so she will achieve something far greater than the 'anschluss'—or union with Austria—to which large sections of German public opinion aspire. She would bring within her orbit not only the 3,000,000 Germans in Czecho-Slovakia, together with the 3,000,000 Hungarians in Czecho-Slovakia and Rumania, but also quite possibly the Hungarian nation itself.

"As a result of such developments, Czecho-Slovakia, which has so systematically violated the Peace Treaty, both by its oppression of racial minorities and its failures to reduce its own armaments, might be elbowed out of existence overnight."

I wish, particularly, to emphasise that this article from which I have just quoted was written in 1930. It foretold both the rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany and that Czecho-Slovakia, as a result, might "be elbowed out of existence overnight."

The more I studied the Central European situation, the more convinced did I become of these things.

Nearly six years after the publication of that article, in May 1936, a close and trusted colleague of mine returning from Germany told me he had the impression that Rome and Berlin had some new, major project in view. I wrote to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the most powerful of their advisers a letter in which I told them of this. One sentence of that letter read:

"If it is not Austria, it may be France and, perhaps, Britain; on the other hand, I have not the least doubt, from hints that have been dropped to me, that overnight sometime soon Czecho-Slovakia will be strangled."

Within a year the anschluss was an accomplished fact; within less than eighteen months Czecho-Slovakia had been made to render back to the Germans the Sudetenland and to the Hungarians those fertile Uplands which had long been part of Hungary's very history.

The Czech tyranny was indeed strangled.

It was between 1930 and 1936 well within the competence of the British Government, acting through Geneva, to force upon Europe a revision of the unjust treaties of Versailles, Trianon and St. Germain. If an abstract love of justice had not prompted, the motive of self-preservation might have provoked such a course.

Nothing was done.

During those years, particularly in the latter three, Germany was growing not only stronger in armed force and national moral, but palpably more restive in her demands for redress.

In April 1936 this was so obvious to me that I wrote, in an article called "Hungary's Joy Bells Will Ring Again," yet another warning of the wrath to come. In it I said:

"New forces are rising in Europe which will make short work of the opposition of those over-indulged and mischievous countries Czecho-Slovakia and Rumania, which, after unjustly despoiling Hungary, have black-mailed the Great Powers into allowing them to keep their plunder. . . . The Czechs, indeed, had no separate existence till after the war, and the vast majority of them continued to fight for the Central Powers right up to the Armistice. A small contingent of deserters and political exiles joined the Allied armies under the name of the Czech Legionaries. They were diligently publicised by certain British pundits who specialised in Central European affairs. . . .

Just how those pundits caused the creation of Czecho-Slovakia I set out at length about a year later when, on February 12th 1937, I published in the The Daily Mail an article which has a melancholy interest in the light of the false hero-worship which was to be paid to Dr. Benes in the following year. I reprint it in full:

THE PRISONERS OF CZECHO-SLOVAKIA

"Most blunders in life have to be paid for. The blunder of creating that synthetic and spurious State called Czecho-Slovakia may well cost Europe another war.

"Of all the reckless things done by the 'peace-makers' in Paris, this was the worst. Yet the biggest ramp in diplomatic history passed all but unnoticed at the time.

"The Czech and pro-Czech intriguers who bamboozled the peace delegates had an easy game. Those overworked and weary statesmen were under strong pressure to finish quickly their recasting of the map of Europe and get back to the urgent problems awaiting them at home.

"A small set of self-seeking or time-serving 'experts' flooded them with one-sided memoranda, minutes, digests, drafts, summaries and maps. The result was that they imposed a settlement entirely in the interests of the Czechs.

"'The agreements and bargains were made behind closed doors,' says the American delegate, Mr. Lansing, in his history of the Peace Conference. One British journalist who was prominent in the hole-and-corner dealings to which Czecho-Slovakia owes her baneful and fraudulent existence boasted in a speech that 'a few experts knowing their own minds and concentrating all their efforts on a given end, can sometimes achieve ends unattainable by the leaders of uninformed opinion and uninformed statesmanship.'

"These Czechs were one of the subject races of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before and throughout the war. Owing to the fact that the Czech soldiers deserted in unusually large numbers, it was possible for pro-Czech busybodies in England and America to represent them as an oppressed nation entitled to indulgent recognition from the Allies.

"At the Peace Conference this view was pressed upon the Supreme Council with much bogus evidence to back it up. A typical example was the notorious 'Pittsburg Agreement' of May 30th 1918, by which Czechs and Slovaks were supposed to have agreed to combine to form a State. This was negotiated by Dr. Masaryk, who afterwards became President of Czecho-Slovakia, during a propaganda tour in the United States.

"When the document was presented to the Peace Conference it occurred to no one to point out that the Czechs and Slovaks who had accepted were all American citizens, and as such hardly qualified to decide the fate of Central Europe. Yet when it had served its purpose this agreement was repudiated by Dr. Masaryk. He had pledged himself to secure for the Slovaks a parliament of their own and autonomous government in the new State. To preserve their own preferential position, the Czechs got out of the bargain by saying that it did not count because it had been signed on a public holiday.

"But Czechs and Slovaks combined numbered only 8 1/2 millions. Accordingly, by all sorts of specious arguments of which the peace delegates in their haste would admit no rebuttal, the Czech leaders asserted a further claim to annex large blocks of peoples of entirely different race.

"In this way Czecho-Slovakia was rounded out on the North by the inclusion of 3 1/4 million Germans who had hitherto been under Austrian rule, and in the south by the ruthless appropriation of three-quarters of a million of pure-blooded Hungarians.

"These two solid contingents of foreigners have since been held as prisoners of Czecho-Slovakia. They were handed over to the Czechs with no more consultation than if they had been cattle, and have been treated by the Czech authorities with no more regard for their rights and feelings.

"As captives of a race notorious for petty meanness they have been subjected to cold-blooded expropriation and oppression. Every effort has been made to suppress their languages, and the Czech police have tried to break their spirit by systematic persecution.

"Last year a Defence of the Realm Act was passed which exposes any German or Hungarian to instant deportation from his home on the frontiers to the interior of the country at the whim of the local Czech authorities.

"For, loaded as they are with spoils, the Czechs have a guilty conscience. They have armed intensely without regard for the spirit of the Treaty of Versailles, to which they owe their adventitious existence.

"Had it not been for Hitler, the Czechs might never have had to rue their evil doings. But the immense development of armed strength in Nazi Germany now threatens them with retribution. The grievances of the 3 1/4 million Germans who live under the oppressive rule of Prague are not unheeded in Berlin, where the just claims of Hungary for the recovery of her lost nationals beyond the Czech border have also found sympathetic consideration.

"The dragon's teeth that the Czechs have sown are sprouting all around them in a crop of deadly dangers.

"Dreading this menace of retribution, Czecho-Slovakia last year made a pact of mutual assistance with Russia. A large mission of Red Air-Force officers at once came to Prague, and has set itself to organise the use of Czech aerodromes and fuel supplies by Bolshevist war-planes.

"The only effect of this has been to fan the smouldering wrath of Germany, for Czecho-Slovakia, thanks to the position carved out for her in the heart of Europe, might well serve as an advanced base for a Soviet attack on Germany. From aerodromes on Czech soil the Bolshevist bombers could be over Berlin, Dresden and Breslau within an hour.

"Ten years ago I said in these columns that Czecho-Slovakia was a disturbing element in Central Europe. To-day the war-clouds hang heavy along her frontiers.

"There might still be time for the Czech Government to make reparation, but it is under the control of the same scheming politicians as brought that hybrid country into existence.

"Dr. Benes, the chief begetter of the Czecho-Slovak State, is now its President. Of him, even so sympathetic a Socialist writer as Professor Harold Laski has said: 'I doubt whether any European statesman entirely trusts Dr. Benes. No one knows better than he how to be most things to all men.'

"Dr. Benes had done well out of his political career. Signs of the wrath to come suggest he would do well either to retire or to reform his prison-camp policy. It is significant that his country has not a single friend among the five States on her own borders.

"The Pharaoh who hardened his heart was engulfed by the Red Sea. It is the more terrible flood of German armaments that is surging round the Czech frontiers to-day. The prisoners of Czecho-Slovakia may yet see their captors overtaken by the fate of the old Egyptian tyrant who would not let the people go."

Despite the onward roll of events which I tried to depict in that article, British rearmament lagged tardily behind even our barest need, and no attempt was made to achieve redress of Central European grievances by diplomatic means.

By April 1938 all that I had predicted of danger had come to actuality.

In that month I had reached my seventieth birthday, which I celebrated by landing from a trans-Atlantic journey just before making a tour of certain European States where, as is my custom, I desired to see things for myself and obtain information at first hand. I could not, I felt, relinquish the political and executive control of The Daily Mail—which I had determined to do at that age—and remain utterly silent upon what I knew to be the gravest set of dangers that had ever threatened the British people. I therefore arranged to contribute some six or seven articles to that paper which took the form of a kind of causerie on current affairs.

My apprehension about the danger to world peace of the situation in Czecho-Slovakia was so acute by this time that this topic in those notes was dominant. Why this was so will be apparent from my remarks published on April 29th, under the heading "A Few Postscripts."

"Numbers of our pugnacious pacifists are now saying that we should stand up for Czecho-Slovakia. Do they realise that almost half its population regards the Government of Czecho-Slovakia as a tyranny?

"Do they realise that the country contains 3,500,000 Germans—24 per cent. of its population—who are deadly hostile to that Government, and with reason?

"In addition to this German minority there are great minorities of Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks and Ruthenians who detest the tyranny of Prague.

"There are at this moment in Czecho-Slovakia 1,300 citizens awaiting trial on charges of military treason, a significant symptom of terror and unrest.

"This caricature of a country under its Czech leaders has from the moment of its birth committed almost every conceivable folly.

"Contrary to the spirit of the very Treaty which created its Constitution, it has armed to the teeth, and used its arms to dragoon those minorities which were handed over to its untender mercies without the asking of their yea or nay.

"It is not the Germans alone who were treated with brutality. Quite recently members of the Hungarian minority found themselves denied visas to enable them to cross the Czecho-Slovakian frontier to their original native country even when their purpose was so personal and so sacred as to attend a mother's funeral.

"The 3,500,000 Germans in Czecho-Slovakia, be it remembered, form a larger community than the population of Southern Ireland, to which the British Government has seen fit to grant independence. . . ."

I added that in my view the British Government should warn France that her treaty with Czecho-Slovakia—far distant as that country is from French frontiers—was a virtual challenge which Germany might not be slow to take up. In the problem of Czecho-Slovakia, I declared, France had no locus standi.

A week later in the second of my "Postscript" articles, I repeated:

"Czecho-Slovakia is not of the remotest concern to us.

"If France likes to burn her fingers there, it is a matter for France, although such a policy is meeting with increasing opposition in France from newspapers and public men. Indeed, the Eclaireur de Nice—one of the three best-known French provincial newspapers—declared only a few days ago that ' the bones of a small French soldier are worth more than all the Czecho-Slovaks in the world. . . . '"

I added to a somewhat lengthy consideration of the state which the problem had then reached a repetition of my warning that:

"Nothing should induce the British Government to mix itself actively in this dangerous problem.

"The Germans are a very patient people. I cannot imagine for one moment that Britain for something like twenty years would have remained quiescent while three and a half million Britons on the frontiers of Britain were under the heel of a thoroughly detested people, speaking a foreign language and with an entirely different national outlook. From what I know of my countrymen, they would have forcibly intervened within a very few years of such an outrage."

My concern with the Central European problem, as I have said earlier, was twofold. The injustice to such a noble people as the Hungarians evoked general resentment. As with Italy and the Abyssinians, it seemed to me that we were tending to attach Britain to an unworthy ally against an ancient friend, that we were striving to perpetuate a situation in which a people to whom Europe owed much were to be placed at the mercy of a cruder and more barbaric race. In addition to this emotion, was that of alarm that we, in our unarmed state, should seem wilfully to try to aid the enemies of Germany in matters that did not concern us except from motives of sheer animosity.

"Reiteration is the soul of journalism"—so I hammered again at my urgent warnings on May 13th 1938:

"We should keep," I wrote, "an entirely free hand in Central European questions. Just as we would refuse to join in any plan for the encirclement of Germany, so we should refuse to have any part in a plan to help economic-ally the neighbouring States of Germany with a desire to injure Germany through trade.

"To divert purchases from other parts of our own Empire in favour of produce from South-eastern Europe with no true economic motive is as much a form of hostile pressure on Germany as any other would be.

"Our interests do not lie in Europe. We are an oceanic people. We are the descendants of the Vikings, and should adhere to our historic role as a maritime people.

"We should look after our Dominions and overseas possessions and proclaim it as our policy that whatever happens on the Continent of Europe—except, possibly, a menace to the French and Belgian frontiers—is no concern of ours.

"If Germany forces a way to the Black Sea, some of us may not like it, but what has it to do with us?

"Hungary is again on tiptoe. The trouble in Czecho-Slovakia is providing her, at long last, with an opportunity to recover that part of that land which has a majority of Hungarians.

"Some ten years ago I received a 'round robin' signed by twenty high officers of the active and reserve army of Hungary, asking me to go to their country and take a hand in its government.

"I told them I thought Admiral Horthy was a great Hungarian patriot who was admirably fulfilling his duties as Regent of Hungary.

"As for a restoration of the Monarchy, I said that they could not go outside the old royal line, and if there were to be any restoration at all, a Hapsburg must succeed a Hapsburg.

"For nineteen years the Government at Budapest has now been supremely prudent, but it seems now that a moment has arrived when a spice of audacity should have play. 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,' says Shakespeare.

"With the aid of her good friends Italy and Germany, Hungary can at last achieve justice, a justice which Britain, at least, will gladly see accorded to the one belligerent enemy State which in the last war did not intern British subjects.

"There is no more stirring incident in the whole history of Europe than that which occurred when the Empress Maria-Theresa, harassed and hounded by her enemies, rallied the Hungarians to her aid. In her darkest despair that great and gallant woman achieved a remarkable reversal of her fortunes. In two stirring sentences a modern historian, Professor Fisher, has described it: 'In the hour of her tribulation Maria-Theresa threw herself upon the loyalty of her Hungarian subjects and found in that chivalrous and warlike aristocracy a fiery response. The Bavarians were driven out of Munich, and French out of Prague.'

"The appeal of the Empress to the people and nobles was made in 1741 at the old town of Pressburg. For hundreds of years the name of that ancient capital of Hungary has been sacred in the legends of the Hungarians.

"It is almost incredible that this historic town should have been ceded to Czecho-Slovakia, but so it was. Immediately the Czechs obtained possession they had the effrontery to change the name to Bratislava.

"Could wanton insult and outrage be carried further?

"Ten or eleven years ago a British officer who had served on the Central Commission on Territorial Questions at the Peace Conference said that the Commissioners were responsible for the inclusion of Pressburg in Czecho-Slovakia.

"I said it was a damned shame.

"His excuse was that the Commission had been told to hurry, that haste was supremely important. The Commission, in fact, had no time for proper examination and consideration.

"It was thus that one of the gravest injustices in history was perpetrated.

"If peace is to have a chance, the sooner the Czecho-Slovakian problem is settled the better. It is at present a canker in the heart of Europe, poisoning the relationships between half its peoples."

Fortunately the whole of the British people were not seized by that queer madness which elevated Dr. Benes to the status of a suffering and persecuted Saint and the Czecho-Slovakian majority into the role of martyrs. The truth did begin to prevail.

In dispelling the fog of falsehood which surrounded the Czecho-Slovakian problem, Mr. Lloyd George did his share. In The Truth About the Peace Treaties (Volume II) he gave a very frank picture of the means whereby Dr. Benes had bamboozled—there is no other word—the Allied Powers into creating Czecho-Slovakia. I cannot do more than extract a few passages:

"On February 5th the Peace Conference," writes Mr. Lloyd George, "invited Dr. Benes, the Prime Minister of the new Czecho-Slovak State, to appear before them and state his case. He presented it with great skill and craft. He either ignored or minimised the fact that he was claiming the incorporation in the Czecho-Slovak Republic of races which, on the principle of self-determination, would have elected to join other States. He was full of professions of moderation, modesty and restraint in the demands put forward for the new Republic. He larded his speech throughout with phrases that reeked with professions of sympathy for the exhalted ideals proclaimed by the Allies and America in their crusade for international right."

From this Pecksniffian attitude Dr. Benes advanced to definite proposals and pledges. He said he:

". . . wished to observe that the Czecho-Slovak Government had no intention whatever of oppressing (the German Bohemians). It was intended to grant them full minority rights, and it was fully realised that it would be political folly not to do so."

This protestation, so soon to be broken, he followed with a Memorandum which he addressed to the New States Committee of the Peace Conference (May 20th 1919) declaring that:

"It is the intention of the Czecho-Slovak Government to create the organisation of the State by accepting as a basis of natural rights the principles applied in the Constitution of the Swiss Republic, that is, to make the Czecho-Slovak Republic a sort of Switzerland, taking into consideration, of course, the special conditions in Bohemia."

Mr. Lloyd George follows the text of this Memorandum by the setting out of seven specific pledges given by Dr. Benes, each one of which was afterwards broken or disregarded (Truth About the Peace Treaties, Vol. II, page 937). He promised "an extremely Liberal regime, which will very much resemble that of Switzerland" (op. cit., 938).

The changing view of the English that Czecho-Slovakia was not a worthy occasion for war enabled me to write more hopefully on May 20th:

"I find a growing appreciation of the justice of Hungary's claims to the restoration of the territory and the people torn from her and given by a hasty and iniquitous treaty to Czecho-Slovakia. The British imagination has been seized by the fact that there are more Germans in Czecho-Slovakia than there are Irishmen in Southern Ireland to whom we have given self-government, and, in addition, large blocs of Hungarians numbering more than a million."

I foresaw that any relief of the Sudetens which was not accompanied by a similar relief of some, if not all, of the other minorities, would bring not peace but a sword to Central Europe. Anxious that the people of Britain and their leaders should not have a false perspective about this I reminded them that:

"Christendom as a whole owes Hungary a great debt. For centuries that country was the bastion against which the forces of Mahomet vainly hurled themselves. The Hungarian King, Louis II, and the flower of his race spent their lives to stem the Turkish tide at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. Not until their strenuous resistance had twice been bloodily overcome did the Turks advance in 1529 to the siege of Vienna, and then so weakened that after three weeks the investment of that city had to be abandoned.

"For more than two centuries Hungary stood guard for Europe against the vast hosts of Mohammedanism, when nothing else would have prevented those great warriors from marching through Europe to the North Sea, to the ruin of our Christian civilisation.

"The endurance which the Hungarians showed in those days towards the Turkish invaders they have displayed since the last war.

"Notwithstanding the impositions, humiliations and cruelties which were heaped upon them by Czecho-Slovakia, they have refrained from violence, and have patiently endured their sufferings in the full hope and knowledge that redress would not be denied to them.

"The Germans, with whom they fought side by side, regarded them as the worthiest of their allies in the last war. The British who fought against them, found them among their stoutest foemen."

Eventually, by the efforts of Germany and Italy at Vienna, Hungary had restored to her her northern tracts and a million of her people. That restoration made a deep difference to European politics. It was to the Totalitarian States, and not to the "democracies," that Hungary had reason for gratitude. There was again demonstrated what I had predicted must come about—the domination of a well-armed, well-disciplined Germany over the affairs of Europe, and the slighting of the ill-armed, muddled and undisciplined democratic States.

The full fruits of that demonstration Europe has not yet gathered.

CHAPTER NINE

THE end of the iniquitous treaties which had made the Czech tyrannies possible came, as all know, in October 1938. Instead of coming, as it might have done, by amicable arrangement, it came by a threat of war. Mr. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain and the leading statesman of the British Empire, had thrice to fly hurriedly to Germany, and had to invoke the aid of Signor Mussolini, whom Britain had treated so contemptuously three years before, in an eleventh hour attempt to prevent the defenceless millions of Britain from being exposed to the danger, if not the actuality of German bombs. By so doing he saved the peace of Europe, and all credit is due to him.

It may be easy now for some minds to minimise the danger of September 1938. At the time it was real enough.

My warnings had always been that no more terrible mistake could be made than to suppose that Herr Hitler was a bluffer. When he insisted upon justice for the Sudeten Germans he was prepared to back his insistence by strong arms. He was ready, if necessary, to face a world war. This he told Mr. Chamberlain frankly.

That the international wrong of placing Hungarians under the heels of the Czechs would some day bring Europe to the brink of war I had predicted for over a decade before the plight of the Sudetens brought re-armed Germany forward as their champion. I was, thus, under no illusion that the crisis was not a real one.

The treatment which Geneva, under the lead of Britain and France, had meted out to Italy in 1935 had so changed European relationships that in March Germany was able to incorporate Austria into the Reich without any action by Italy to prevent it. It was obvious that over the question of Czecho-Slovakia the Rome-Berlin Axis would be solid in the following September.

Between the visit of Mr. Chamberlain to Berchtesgarten and his visit to Munich the dreadful and imminent possibility was that Britain might find herself at war with this strong combination.

The British know now, through the revelations of such men as General Harington and Captain Liddell Hart, that neither in these islands nor in the Mediterranean were they prepared for aerial assault. I was convinced of it at the time.

I had predicted the danger long before it developed and had repeatedly warned the nation, as this book records, of its complete unpreparedness. Because of this I watched with special sympathy and anxiety the great efforts which Mr. Chamberlain was making to avert a catastrophe.

Central Europe in arms and mobilised—and the German Fuehrer about to address his own nation in a speech which might mean the launching of war—that was the situation at the very height of the crisis, on September 26 1938. On that day I wired to Herr Hitler in these terms:

"You have had proofs of my friendship towards Germany, and I am confident you will not resent it if I venture respectfully to appeal to you before you speak to-night.

"Peace and war are in the balance, and like you I know what are the horrors of war, for, as you are aware, I lost two of my three sons in the last war.

"A hopeful word from you would bring relief to millions."

"Yours very sincerely,

"ROTHERMERE."

War was averted, thanks to the initiative and energy of Mr. Chamberlain and the co-operation of Signor Mussolini. The Sudeten prisoners of Czecho-Slovakia were freed.

The later restoration of Hungarian territories and populations, of which I have written in the previous chapters, was the inevitable sequel. The agreement of Munich made possible the arbitration of Vienna.

What the democratic States, with their often reiterated adulation of "self-determination" had failed to do for the oppressed minorities under Dr. Benes, the Totalitarian States had done. They had done it because they were ready to fight if necessary for a justice about which the unarmed nations could only talk.

In that tremendous week Herr Hitler had the fate of Europe in his hands. Having recorded how, when he was still derided and ridiculed, I had tried to impress upon the British public the true significance of the man, which was proved fully at Godesberg and Munich, I must now recall how my efforts were renewed when the Munich crisis was developing.

CHAPTER TEN

It is foolish to sneer at truisms. They are valuable because they are truisms—in other words, they are true. One of the most hackneyed of them is that it is impossible to make omelettes without breaking eggs. Another is that you cannot make a revolution in kid gloves.

The happy and sheltered peoples of the British Isles, who have known neither invasion nor revolution for centuries past, resent bitterly and strongly the methods of force which were used by both Signor Mussolini and Herr Hitler in establishing and maintaining their respective systems of government. Both Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were actually counter-revolutions. They were reactions from Communism. Communism in action is an ugly thing. It is not to be stopped nor overturned by speeches and ballot-boxes.

The necessity for such use of force was well understood by Lord Baldwin, who has never shown himself friendly to either Fascism or Nazism, when he told the House of Commons that:

"The German is naturally a law-abiding man, and he had a glimpse into the abyss when Communism in Germany raised its head—and Communism was a creed of violence and force. It was beaten ultimately by another creed of violence and force."

For the understanding of Herr Hitler and his remarkable career it is necessary that the circumstances of his attainment to leadership should first be understood. For the bath of misery in which the Germans were compelled to wallow during the years when waves of inflation rolled over their economic heads the victors in the last war were largely to blame. They did not give to the old German Republic the aid which they might have given and which would have averted the worst of the evils. They did nothing to teach the Germans to look elsewhere than to Communism for their salvation.

Herr Hitler was one of those gallant men of the trenches who returned to civilian life to find their ardours and sufferings and bravery scoffed at by those they had tried to defend. Eventually he saw his race, both in Germany and Austria, over-run by a political gang of terrorists known to be financed by money from Bolshevist Russia. In his passionate determination to redeem his country from the horror about him, it was inevitable that he should first deal forcefully with those inside his own borders who were the cause of that horror and truculently with those outside his own borders who were indirectly responsible for it.

The means and weapons by which Nazism in Germany, as Fascism in Italy, came to power were not the wanton choice of brutal men. They were the only means. The alternative was failure and destruction.

While I have always understood the British antipathy to the use of physical violence, I have equally understood the causes of its use in countries abroad of different circumstances from our own. I understand it there, just as I understand the causes of the violence shown to the rebels in India when the Sepoys were blown from the guns after the massacre of British women and children at Delhi. I deplore the use of concentration camps in Germany and Italy to-day, just as I deplored Kitchener's use of them in Africa at the beginning of the century, but in each case I have understood their evil necessity.

For this reason, and because I knew the man, I felt constrained, when Herr Hitler was being roundly abused by the English Left-wing Press, to tell the British public what I knew of him. In two issues of The Daily Mail in May 1938 I wrote of him what I now gladly put on more permanent record:

"Great numbers of people in England," I wrote, "regard Herr Hitler as an ogre, but I would like to tell them how I have found him. He exudes good-fellowship. He is simple, unaffected and obviously sincere. It is untrue that he habitually addresses private individuals as if they were public meetings.

"He is supremely intelligent. There are only two others I have known to whom I could apply this remark—Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Lloyd George. If you ask Herr Hitler a question, he makes an instant reply full of information and eminent good sense. There is no man living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would sooner take.

"He believes that Germany has a divine mission and that the German people are destined to save Europe from the designs of revolutionary Communism. He has a great sense of the sanctity of the family, to which Communism is antagonistic, and in Germany has stopped the publication of all indecent books, the production of suggestive plays and films, and has thoroughly cleaned up the moral life of the nation.

"Herr Hitler has a great liking for the English people. He regards the English and the Germans as being of one race. This liking he cherishes notwithstanding, as he says, that he has been sorely tried by malicious personal comments and cartoons in the English Press.

"I was talking with Herr Hitler some eighteen months ago when he said, 'Certain English circles in Europe speak of me as an adventurer. My reply is that adventurers made the British Empire.'"

To this I added some details of a conversation I had had with him about relative air strengths, and the following week, in response, as will be seen, to the interest my picture of the man had aroused, I wrote further:

"My remarks about Herr Hitler last week aroused a great deal of interest, apparently, among readers who hitherto have had to form their idea of him from newspaper comments and caricature.

"Herr Hitler is proud to call himself a man of the people, but, notwithstanding, the impression that has remained with me after every meeting with him is that of a great gentleman. He places a guest at his ease immediately. When you have been with him for five minutes, you feel that you have known him for a long time.

"His courtesy is beyond words, and men and women alike are captivated by his ready and disarming smile.

"He is a man of rare culture. His knowledge of music, painting and architecture is profound."

Many people seemed to find difficulty in reconciling the conception of a man of culture with a man of resolute action.

Why this should be so, I do not know. British 'Christian Generals' like Havelock and Gordon had the same mixture of traits. General John Nicholson, one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, was a man of great culture and personal piety, but he was relentless not only with the enemy but with his own colleagues if he esteemed them weak. Almost his dying words when he learnt that his successor in command was showing an unwise softness to the enemy were, "Thank God, I still have strength enough left to shoot him!"

It is probable that if a poll were taken to decide who in common estimation is the greatest political Englishman ever thrown up in our history, the name of Cromwell would lead all others. But Cromwell was a man of the greatest determination and the most ruthless methods.

The two sides of character shown by such honoured Englishmen and by Herr Hitler are as familiar as anything in human history. Shakespeare was aware of them when he wrote:

"In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness, and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard favoured rage. . . ."

Whatever means the new regime in Germany found necessary to establish itself, it is undoubtedly true, as I wrote on May 20th 1938 in The Daily Mail that:

"Herr Hitler's policy is achievement without bloodshed. He reached supremacy in Germany, a country of 68,000,000 people, with little loss of life. Austria was brought into the German Empire without a single shot being fired.

"In the troubles in Palestine during the past five years more people have lost their lives than in Germany and Austria from the establishment of the Hitler regime to the present time."

It was because of current misunderstanding about Germany that I appended to my notes on Herr Hitler two more general paragraphs:

"My special study of Germany continues to-day for one special reason. It is that I believe that without amity between Britain and Germany world peace is impossible." I urge all my countrymen to use, individually and collectively, their influence to cause such a difference in temper and outlook as will enable the greatest oceanic Power in the world to join hands with what is easily the greatest land Power.

"Herr Hitler has several times mentioned my campaign for a large air force for Britain. He has always told me that in my position he would have acted the same way. He believes that every country should be armed for one and every emergency.

"Without adequate arms a nation suffers from a want of self-respect. An unarmed country is a poor compliment to all those who built it up by endeavour, initiative and sacrifice." {f/n 1: These quotations are from the articles "Further Postscripts" and "Some More Postscripts" in The Daily Mail of May 13th and May 20th 1938.}

My belief in the necessity for amity between London and Berlin was proved to be sound when less than half a year aft