The Day Gone By by Richard Adams

Author:Richard Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watership Down Enterprises
Published: 2014-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

Munich. The name resonates, a name of unease, foreboding and, retrospectively, shame. What can I add to all that has been said on the subject of those terrible days during the high summer of 1938? Only this: that whoever you were, business-man, bobby or bootblack, it came piercing into your personal life like no other occurrence for nearly twenty years past. There was going to be a war: there wasn’t going to be a war: there was. The news obliterated everyone’s personal preoccupations, rolling over them like a fog. It was like driving along an open road and suddenly coming upon a terrible accident, with flashing lights and peremptory policemen.

I was only eighteen, but old enough, when Mr Chamberlain came back to London waving his piece of paper, to feel two things. The first was that while he was clearly fooling himself, he didn’t fool me and he didn’t fool a lot of other people. It was too good to be true. Did he really suppose that Hitler, after taking the Rhineland, Austria and now the Sudeten areas, was going to stop at that? If he did, he could only be the victim of wishful thinking. I remember laughing bitterly at the cartoonist David Low’s summary: ‘The Führer gave his solemn promise that there would be no further trouble until next time.’

The second was that I felt ashamed. I had been brought up to feel pride in Britain - in the British Empire. Britannia ruled the waves. No one could dictate to Britain. But now they had. Underneath all the waffle about ‘negotiations’ remained the fact that Hitler had demanded, with threats, the Sudeten areas. We had begun by saying ‘No’ and had ended by saying ‘Oh, all right’. And we had sold Czechoslovakia, a country which had been ready to fight. We had sold them without any representative of theirs being present. Of course, I had no reliable knowledge - no one had, really — about our preparedness for war. Even today, people are still arguing about whether or not we could practicably have gone to war in 1938. But I believe that if we had felt sufficient determination, we probably could. The main reason why we didn’t was an imponderable: we didn’t want to, we weren’t in the right collective state of mind, and everyone over thirty or thirty-five had memories they couldn’t bear to face, of the Great War of 1914-18.

All the same, after Munich everyone felt virtually certain that there was going to be a war. The only question was when and how it would start. Hitler’s taking over of the whole of Czechoslovakia early in the following year should, as far as our honour was concerned, have been the casus belli. All it seemed to give rise to, however (as a friend of mine remarked), was a lot of casus belli-aching by Mr Chamberlain. He had been made to look a fool. His piece of paper was worthless, his credibility gone. All his defenders

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