Guilty Men

THE anonymous author of this brief and stingingly satirical assault upon the men who guided Britain down into the most desperate crisis of her history leaves no doubt whatever as to his purpose. He takes his title from that episode of the French Revolution when an angry crowd burst in upon the talkers of the convention: ‘The people,’ cried their spokesman, ‘haven’t come here to be given a lot of phrases. They demand a dozen guilty men.’ ‘Cato’ lists fifteen British politicians of the ‘old gang’ by name — indicts them for blindness, inertia, incompetence, and stupidity, and in effect demands that the large number of them still holding positions of power under the Churchill government be thrown out, neck and crop. He not only calls them guilty; he wants their heads.

The book looked too dangerous to the powerful unofficial censorship of the big British book-distributing companies, but the British public discovered and is devouring it nevertheless. Nor — for more than one reason — should Americans neglect it.

Opening with an impressive picture of the heroic shambles on Dunkirk beach, it then goes back to retrace, by chapter and verse, the history of political blunder and inadequate preparedness which led up to that disaster. It does so with a kind of bitter jocularity, perhaps impossible to any save a British pamphleteer. Mr. MacDonald’s flatulence, Mr. Baldwin’s masterly inanitions, the disastrous folly of Sir Samuel Hoare’s Anglo-German naval treaty of 1935, the still more disastrous absurdity and insincerity of the Ethiopian policy, the tragedy of Munich and the fumbling statesmanship which sought to repair it by substituting the Polish cavalry for the Czech armored divisions and sacrificing a possible Russian alliance to the good will of Colonel Beck — these are all touched off with an acid brevity.

The more famous quotations, and some not so famous, reappear — Mr. Baldwin’s celebrated explanation that he had not summoned the country to rearm ‘because nothing would have made the loss of the election more certain’; Mr. Chamberlain’s alleged explanation that he had expected Hitler to keep the Munich promise ‘because this time he promised me’; the same statesman’s declaration, on the eve of the Norwegian surprise, that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’; and the many, many formal assurances, throughout the whole period, that the government would rearm, was rearming, that nothing was being left undone, that British air power was superior to the German, that there was no cause to worry.

A great deal of all this is probably more familiar and therefore less shocking to American readers than to British — whose ears have been rather more carefully protected by voluntary press censorship. What are not so familiar to Americans are the author’s notes on the rôles of Horace Wilson, the civil servant; Margesson, the Conservative chief whip; and Kingsley Wood, not merely as responsible minister but as boss of the Conservative Party machine and therefore powerful unofficial judge of his own official performances. There is a swift insight here into the mechanics of the long Conservative Party ‘dictatorship,’ which not only explains the survival of men against whom such colossal failures have been proved by events, but also, perhaps, has something to say about ‘Cato’ and why the big book distributors tried to suppress him. Though it seems so, this is not really an attack simply on individual incompetence. It is also an indirect attack upon the British governing class and its party expression.

That class has just saved itself by producing a Churchill, who can unite all classes and parties for the great task in hand. But some pretty deep issues remain unanswered; the survival of the Chamberlain group is a symbol of them, and ‘Cato’s’ rapier touches rather close to the quick. On the abstract fairness of the thrusts a brief review cannot pass. But Americans may well read the book. We have our own ‘guilty men’ — some in the Administration perhaps, rather more outside it; we have blunder and blindness in face of a crisis much more clear and imminent than that which advanced on Baldwin’s government; and we have our own deep issues being met by evasion. ‘Cato’s’ is a sprightly as well as a bitter record which is worth looking at.

WALTER MILLIS