BOOKS
Digging up the Undertaker
Alastair Forbes
My interest in the young historian from the University of East Anglia, Dr John Charmley, was first aroused some years ago when he contributed to these pages a review into which he had unex- pectedly dropped my own name, claiming that I had on a certain matter been an influential informant in wartime of Win- ston Churchill. Not long thereafter I made his acquaintance, when he came to seek my help in the course of his researches into the career and personality of Duff Cooper, on whose biography he was then engaged, a book that on its appearance was deservedly to win widespread praise. That afternoon, in White's, a club of which Duff had once been Chairman as well as my proposer for membership there, I found him a delightful fellow, who kept a cool head at teatime as he downed a double gin and tonic for every cup I took of Darjeeling. That he had long been a diligent Nosey Parker down at the Public Record Office at Kew was evident, not least when he produced for me a photostat of a wartime Foreign Office document in which Anthony Eden, having first pettily descended to recommending, for bad and insufficient reasons, punitive action against me, wanted to pursue the matter all the more strenuously after an underling had counselled caution, minut- ing that I was a personal friend of the Prime Minister and of his family. This revelation provided me with ample further proof of what my ears and eyes had long since cottoned on to, namely that he had nourished a visceral loathing of Winston throughout his political career.
At my age one comes greatly to value new and younger friends and I took a distinct shine to John Charmley. So did my much older friends, Lord and Lady Lloyd, to whom I had successfully proposed that he undertake for them a life of George Lloyd, the first Baron of Dolobran, that remarkable proconsul of the Empire's penultimate period and later creator of the British Council as well as leading anti- Munichite. This assignment he carried out with no less distinction, despite his absurd- ly unscholarly inability (still, I see from the present volume, apparently incorrigible) to master the surely quite plain-sailing proper styles and titles of such Britons, male and female, whom it has pleased neither God, government nor sovereign to leave in peace as plain Mr, Mrs or Miss. His next ably carried out commission was the edit- ing of the diaries of that excellent chap and skilled carpenter, Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, a longtime Principal Private Secretary to Anthony Eden. These contained much fascinating and illuminating material about the latter's career and personality, though, perhaps for that very reason, Mr Robert Rhodes James, the author of his official and sickeningly over-hagiographic biogra- phy, chose to ignore them. (Dr Charmley's own view of the self-scuppering Suez PM has always been nearer to that of his less Establishmentarian historian friend, David Carlton, whose own study was in such superior contrast to Rhodes James's.) It is, of course, painfully clear that there is a lot of contagious revisionism about in the competitive world of academic history, where gimmicky authors are on tiptoe to catch the eyes of avid hype-hungry media operators. I daresay the original virus was first spawned by Professor A J P Taylor and his Maecenas Max Beaverbrook, who himself so consistently over the years espoused the cause of appeasing first Hitler and then Stalin by abandoning most of the countries of the European continent to them like so many oysters to the Walrus and the Carpenter.
All the same, I was more than a little surprised when Charmley, apparently ex- cited by his rummaging at Cambridge in the rich treasure-trove of politicians' pap- ers there to be found, warned me at our last talk that I was not going to like his next book. He amazed me by announcing that it was intended to be virtually a rehabilita- tion of Neville Chamberlain, based, I gathered, largely on the surely very ques- tionable assessments of Halifax, Rab But- ler and the appalling Neville Henderson. Well, as no doubt Charmley has sometimes heard on the Norwich campus from Mal- colm Bradbury, 'You can't win them all', and he has made a great hash of his ill-advised attempt to beatify, almost to canonise, the obstinate, insular and con- ceited 'Monsieur J'aime-Berlin'. After all, it had been the latter's 'fawning over Hitler, sell-out of the Czechs and smug pride in the piece of trumpery he and Hitler signed at Munich' (Professor Man- chester scripsit) that had finally disgusted Duff Cooper into being the only man, and the only man man enough, to resign from a cabinet in which he had for a very long time been a lone voice. In 1936 he had urged that Hitler should be stopped in his tracks before he achieved first-strike capa- bilities against the peace Baldwin had earlier decreed was 'worth taking any risk' to maintain. Adequate dissuasive rearma- ment, however, he deemed altogether too risky.
Though Charmley sets out to 'delineate Chamberlain's struggle to avert the inevit- able consequences of war', he succeeds only in re-emphasising how his obstinacy and conceit in the field of foreign affairs (of which his much more distinguished half- brother Austen had in vain reminded him that he 'knew nothing') was to make war inevitable. For first his Chancellorship and then his Premiership had left his own country in the worst possible condition to defeat an adversary who had immediately, on taking power in 1933, put his country on a war footing, calling in Schachtian finan- cial theory and so practising it as to make possible the end of unemployment, with humming arms factories and swelling armed forces, while stick-in-the-mud par- liamentary democracies dithered and trem- bled in the meantime, punchdrunk before their opponent had even struck his first blow.
Now it is quite true, as Churchill said,
that both world wars could be classified as `unnecessary' ones. The first, in particular, might have been avoided up to the last minute had Britain's intentions only been more clearly signalled to Berlin and Vien- na. The peace that followed it was certainly threatened before the ink was dry on the disastrous Treaties of Versailles, St Ger- main and Sevres. But it need not have given place to war or been 'lost' had a more robust stand been taken in its defence, long before Chamberlain's ignoble humiliations in a desperate, doomed-in-advance strug- gle to change Hitler's determination to better Napoleon's record with his slogan `Today Europe, Tomorrow the World'. Looking down from his dais at a parade of Reichswehr and Panzer Divisions, Hitler was heard to mutter, 'How could anyone believe I was not going to send these magnificent troops to fight?' They were always for use, never just for show.
But they were still thin on the ground, and not yet fully trained when on Saturday 7 March 1936 they were ordered into a Rhineland that had been demilitarised under the Versailles Treaty, in breach, more to the point, of the much later Treaty of Locarno to which Germany had been an unharassed and perfectly willing signatory. The German Minister for War had made clear that if he encountered so much as a single French bayonet he intended to order `a hasty retreat'. On German soil myself that day, I was half tempted to believe Hitler's accompanying pledge: `Germany has no territorial demands to make in Europe . . . Germany will never break the
peace'; but in Paris, on the morrow, I was surprised by the hesitancy of the French to stand by their Locarno obligations and their decision to haver while awaiting the reassurance that the still more hesitant Britons would honour their own.
No doubt it was disingenuous of the French Government to force their robust Foreign Minister, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, to start the absurd `After you, Mr Eden' `After you, Monsieur Flandin' music-hall routine that was, with changes of cast, to bedevil Anglo-French diplomacy and sabotage the chances of peace right up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, by which time French morale had dropped through the floor. But Eden's stalling and embarrassed silence in the face of an ally's request at that time was the first shameful blot on a career that was to be sullied by others before it fizzled out 20 years later, leaving him to live out his days in a kind of retrospective Walter Mitty mist of self- justification. It was unqestionably his guilt about his 1936-1939 inaction that impelled him in 1956 to 'stand up to' a foreign dictator who had little more in common with Hitler than Margaret Thatcher, i.e. the letters 'er' at the end of his surname. German documents have since confirmed that, had a contingency plan been put into effect to offer a show of military force to restore the status quo in the zone, the German General staff intended to get back across the Rhine forthwith, with strong hopes that Hitler's government would then fall and Nazism with it. A new treaty could then have allowed the Rhineland's reoc- cupation. If only . . . for it was surely then that peace was put most decisively on the skids.
Thereafter, as Professor Manchester shows, in the massively impressive middle volume of his formidable trilogy — a truly scholarly demonstration of the years Jack Kennedy once entitled 'While England Slept' — the only genuine peacemonger was the man most often accused both by Hitler and the British of being the oppo- site, Winston Churchill. His 'Arms and the Covenant' plan for 'a strong confederacy for defence and peace' of powers that would guarantee the frontiers of Germany as well as those of her neighbours was at the time and remains in retrospect the only hope of drawing the Nazi sting and en- couraging the opposition to Hitler.
The Germans were obviously pleased that Schacht's economics had enabled the Nazis to end unemployment, but they did not want war any more than, under Stalin's and his successors' war economy, the Russian people have wanted war. Though even Chamberlain had at one time been tempted to adopt a similar course to the one advocated by Churchill, he soon reco- vered his conviction that only he and his horrible little Treasury Sancho Panza, Horace Wilson, should be left to deal with Hitler in their own suicidal way, sacrificing along it so many Christian Slays and other minorities, destined, after an interval of slavery, to follow Jews and gypsies to extinction.
The moral of this appalling story could perhaps best be stated in the warning words of, I believe, Sir Eyre Crowe, he of the famous memorandum: 'Never believe what you want to believe until you know what you ought to know'. The fictionally so much vaunted British and French Intelli- gence seems, for the most part, to have been far inferior to the German, and whenever it was good Chamberlain simply refused to believe it. He had recorded of his first meeting with Hitler the wishful impression (horribile dicta in almost the same words Churchill and Eden were so long to repeat of Stalin) that 'Here was a man that could be relied upon when he had given his word'. He would simply have refused to believe it had he been furnished with the absolutely truthful information that Hitler in private referred to him as that 'arsehole' (arschloch) and was con- temptuous of the ease with which he could be led up any garden path, even if he was surprised at the old boy's pluck in having his baptismal aeroplane flight on the bum- py low-altitude path to Germany (where John Charmley seems to confuse Berghof with Brown House, not the sort of floater Manchester ever commits). Nothing Charmley has dug up can save the 'Under- taker', as his subject was often known, from sharing the judgment a better histo- rian has made of Philip II of Spain: 'No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its general excellence'.
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