When There Is No Peace
by [Macmillan, $1.75]
THE historian of the times will note a curious contradiction about the aftermath of the Munich Settlement. Thanksgiving from the hearts of mankind the world over bathed the signatories in a benediction. But the minds of men acted differently. Either the peace or the Hitlerian aftermath of the peace has induced the greatest intellectual ferment of modern times.
I mean of course in those countries where controversy is still permissible. In post-Munich Britain there is an embattled sort of separation of Chamberlainites and anti-Chamberlainites. The two camps are said to glare at each other across dinner tables, and hostesses fear collision at the slightest provocation!
In America the argumentation is only a little less bitter. Here the accusation is freely made that Mr. Chamberlain hid a deal behind his duel with Hitler, that the business man from Brummagem is simply a Nazi. Munich certainly put many Americans, in Shakespearean language, from their faith in, not to say their reliance upon, Britain. It drove Americans and their government straightway in quest of a policy toward a chaos abroad created by the disappearance of two ‘great designs,’ Pax Britannica and Geneva.
To this seething stew Hamilton Fish Armstrong contributes the first published review of what turned out to be the Munich armistice. It is an engrossing account, and a topical one. One might call it a fitting finale to the great journalism which Munich produced in America. For Munich provided a panorama as well as an epitaph — a panorama so blurred that none could see the wood for the trees. No journalist has rendered a better service than has Mr. Armstrong in re-creating the circumstances and the events of this cosmic episode. And none was better fitted for the task.
As editor of Foreign Affairs, and a constant contributor to it, Armstrong stands halfway between historian and journalist. He has the expertise of the journalist combined with a historical sense. Moreover, no American journalist has a wider acquaintance with the men who make the news. His ‘contacts’ have stood him in good stead in writing this survey. For instance, he has not only retraced the history as the world lived and read it; he has obtained from Czechoslovakian records several important documents which were omitted from the British white papers.
Naturally, even with these additions, the record is still incomplete, and, if Mr. Armstrong provides facts galore for the controversialists, he raises heaps of new questions. Take, for instance, the scene in France. Mr. Armstrong assembles official and newspaper comment on the British Foreign Office statement that Britain and Soviet Russia would stand by France in case France should go to the aid of Czechoslovakia. This was on September 26. It supplemented a private pledge given to MM. Daladier and Bonnet that same morning. Nevertheless, when the Foreign Office communication arrived in Paris, it was freely branded as an invention, while MM. Daladier and Bonnet explicitly encouraged this interpretation. It looks as if French unreadiness to meet Hitler’s challenge were one of the decisive reasons for Munich.
This and other questions will no doubt be answered when the dramatis personæ write their memoirs. And before they are published many other accounts of Munich will come off the press to help the world piece together the exact manner in winch the Munich corner was turned. Till then the reader will be grateful to Mr. Armstrong for an account of Munich which will be necessary reading for those who presume to argue about it.
H. B. ELLISTON