The Appeaser
I: The Memory of Shame BOOTHBY, MP By SIR ROBERT m s book* almost defies review. If you fall under the author's spell, as so many have done, including the present writer, criticism becomes a kind of sacrilege. Even when you are shocked, and there are passages by which I was deeply shocked, Lord Halifax compels you to accept him for what in fact he is—a grand seigneur and a great gentleman, in the best sense of that much-abused term : one of the last pro- * FULNESS OF DAYS. By Lord Halifax. (Collins, 25s.) ducts of what is rather naively called on the cover 'a remarkable civilisation that has already passed away.'
As an intimate picture of family life in one of the great Victorian country houses the opening chapter, etched with a hand that never falters, can hardly be surpassed. So it continues. Whenever the author describes the Yorkshire or the Indian scene, his friends, Oxford and All Souls, above all his father and the faith which inspired him, the book glows. Only when it touches politics does it go dead. It is difficult to believe that he held high office, almost continuously, for over twenty years. On the contrary, as you read on you begin to feel that it was jolly good of him to leave, even for a while, the life he loved and lived so well at Garrowby; and that he himself would probably concur in this view.
A cursory reference to the fall of the Coalition Government in 1922 gives a significant indication of things to come. After quoting with approval Baldwin's warning that Lloyd George was a dynamic force, and that this could be a terrible thing, Lord Halifax continues : 'It was the last straw when the general public came to think that the three ablest members of the Cabinet, Lloyd George, Churchill and Birkenhead, were pursuing a personal policy, involving a fair risk of getting the country into war with Turkey.' Compare this with Churchill : 'I found myself in this business with a small group of resolute men. We made common cause. The Government might break up and we might be relieved of our burden. The nation might not support us : they could find others to advise them. The Press might howl, the Allies might bolt. We intended to force the Turk to a negotiated peace before he should set foot in Europe. The aim was modest; but the forces were small.'
In the event the aim was realised—before the fateful meeting at the Carlton Club. This was the last occasion on which Britain stood up to a threat of naked aggression until 1939. The group of young Tories who came to dominate the Party were frightened by what had already happened, and still more by the methods which had been used to make it happen. Here, in a nutshell, is the issue and the argument which culminated in Munich and the Second World War.
As Viceroy Lord Halifax nearly brought off a spectacular triumph. The cast of his mind enabled him to comprehend the spiritual forces and com- plex intellectual processes which animated Gandhi as no other British statesman could have hoped to do; and he was bewildered by the reaction in Parliament to the agreed announcement regarding Dominion status. 'I cannot doubt,' he writes, 'that the choice by public men in England of an attitude and language so lacking in imagination and sym- pathy was not without its influence at a formative moment, and strengthened the demand for independence.' Nevertheless there was another chance. The blueprint of Indian Federation emerged from the Round Table Conference of 1930 and, as a result of the vehement efforts of Sir Samuel Hoare, reached the statute book. It never came to life. For India as a whole, says the author, the failure of Federation was a disaster; and again lays the blame upon the diehard opposi- tion in Parliament. It is an inadequate explanation.
On this issue the Labour Party was supporting an overwhelming Conservative majority. If in the early Thirties Baldwin, with Halifax restored to the Cabinet, had exhibited only a tithe of that dynamic force which he found so 'terrible' in Lloyd George, there might have been a different story to tell.
One approaches, with justified trepidation, the stony road of appeasement; and reads with wide- eyed amazement the following : 'The criticism excited by Munich never caused me the least surprise. I should very possibly indeed have been among the critics myself, if I had not happened— to be in a position of responsibility. . . . They ought to have criticised the failure of successive Governments, and of all parties, to foresee the necessity of re-arming in the light of what was going on in Germany; and the right date on which criticism ought to have fastened was 1936, which had seen the German re-occupation of the Rhine- land in defiance of treaty provisions. I have little doubt that if we had then told Hitler bluntly to go back, his power for future and larger mischief would have been broken.'
This fairly leaves one gasping. Lord Halifax was a member of the British Cabinet from 1932 onwards. In 1935 he was Secretary of State for War, and as such the recipient of a whole series of cogent warnings from our Ambassador and Military Attaché in Berlin, not to mention a formidable memorandum from Sir Robert Vansittart in which all the evidence of the con- quering aims, plans and rearmament of Germany was marshalled and brilliantly deployed.
There are some disconcerting indications of his attitude of mind. Of Goering, for instance, he writes : 'I was immensely entertained at meeting the man. One remembered all the time that he had been concerned with the "clean-up" in Berlin on June 30th, 1934, and I wondered how many people he had been responsible for getting killed. Like a great schoolboy, full of life and pride in all he was doing, showing it all off, and talking high politics out of the setting of green jerkin and red dagger' : and of Goebbels, 'I had expected to dislike him intensely, but am ashamed to say I did not.' Despite this, you would never glean from these pages that the author became the willing accomplice and principal instrument of Chamberlain in his policy of rabid appeasement; that in 1938 he wrote private letters to Sir Nevile Henderson (who had succeeded Phipps as British Ambassador in Berlin, and whose name does not appear in the index) which to this day make one hot with shame; or that, as Foreign Secretary, he acquiesced in the displacement of Vansittart by Sir Horace Wilson.
Whom does he blame this time? Believe it or not, Churchill—for laying down, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29, and before Hitler had even been heard of, that no major war was to be expected for ten years; and the poor old British public for 'a wholly irrational pacifist sentiment.' I believe this to be profoundly untrue. I was myself active in politics throughout this period, as representative of a Scottish con- stituency with a strong radical tradition extending over a century. They neve6cavilled when I sup- ported Churchill's demands for massive rearma- ment, nor even when I advocated compulsory national service in January, 1938. All the country needed in these fateful years was resolute and courageous leadership; and that it never got. The alleged pacifist sentiment was eagerly deduced from a freak by-election at Fulham, and used as an excuse for palsied inaction by the worst government this country has known since that of Lord North.
Towards the end of the book Lord Halifax gives us, as an illustration of Baldwin's 'firm faith and simple goodness,' a letter written by him in July, 1940, in which he says that God's plan must be incomprehensible; and goes on to describe what amounts to a vision in which he was told that he mild not see the plan, but that there was a purpose in stripping him of all the human props on which he depended, and leaving him alone in the world. 'You have now,' said the voice, 'one upon whom to lean, and I have chosen you as my instrument to work with my will. Why then are you afraid?'
So now it is not only the Conservative diehards, and Churchill, and the British electorate, but God Himself who has to take the blame. If the Almighty bears any resemblance to the God of the Old Testament, I doubt if He will accept it. It was not by means of appeasement that Moses led the children of Israel to the promised land; or indeed that they have got back there. The verdict of the Deity and of posterity will, I fear, be hard on the pre-war Establishment; on Baldwin, Halifax, Simon, Chamberlain and Hoare, who constituted its political core; on Geoffrey Dawson, who was its Secretary-General; and on All Souls, which was its GHQ. Between them they directed us to disaster; and brought the British Empire, in seven years, from a position of absolute security to the brink of total destruction. Why? The charitable and probably the correct view is that they were all too nice and too high-minded for the very rough world in which we live. They found them- selves confronted by a gang of bloodthirsty ruffians under the leadership of a frantic and ferocious madman with a destructive genius of unparalleled malignity—and behaved like gentle- men. The result was catastrophic. Much can be said about Hitler and Mussolini, but by no stretch of the imagination can they be described as gentlemen; and it required something more than a gentleman to deal with them.
This in conclusion : In Washington Lord Halifax achieved what he had so narrowly missed in Delhi—spectacular success. And, although it might be a shade duller, the world would certainly be a better place if it consisted of people like Baldwin and himself.
Previous page
