The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (174 page)

Although unwritten and largely unspoken, the terms of the social contract were handed down from generation to generation and seldom challenged. Now the hunger riots had changed all that. The precise distinctions between the classes would never be the same. If mobs could roam London, those in power reasoned, their troubles with the lower middle, working, and underclasses had just begun. They were right, but wrong to blame Moscow and its British minions. Englishmen kept their places when they and their families were fed, clothed, and housed. The unemployed, however, knew no such restraint. The man without a situation took little risk, and might attract attention to his cause, by stoning limousines, joining a demonstration—or joining the Communist party. To those in power such men, by their very numbers, were alarming. Nearly a quarter of the country’s work force was jobless, and in some dark pockets the figure reached 50, 60, or even 70 percent. England had to export or die. That was the fate of an island nation. Now goods lay in mountainous stacks in warehouses or on wharves. Desperate, His Majesty’s Government adopted draconian measures—£24,149,060 in new taxes and £2,344 in spending cuts.

Among those affected by the cuts were British tars. An able seaman’s pay was reduced from four shillings a day (ninety-seven cents) to three shillings (seventy-three cents). Shattering three centuries of tradition, men of the Royal Navy mutinied. Over thirteen thousand of His Majesty’s sailors anchored in Cromarty Firth, Scotland—men whose ships bore such proud names as
Nelson, Repulse,
and
Valiant
—defied their officers, sang “The Red Flag,” and elected leaders for what can only be called their own soviet. Only a handful were punished. Their pay was restored. The Admiralty angrily denounced HMG’s capitulation, calling it a ghastly precedent. The government agreed but said it had had no choice.

And, of course, the grim facts did bear political implications. In December 1929 there had been just 3,200 Communists in Britain, 550 of them organized in cells. Now the hammer and sickle was carried through the heart of London. Membership in the CPGB was growing rapidly as the Depression deepened, increasing by 140 percent, then 259 percent, then 282 percent. And these were only the hard-core, card-carrying members. The number of sympathizers was far larger; in two by-elections the Communist candidates received, respectively, 31.9 and 33.8 percent of the vote.

At the same time, Communists everywhere had become more militant and more submissive to Moscow. This was one result of the Comintern’s Tenth Plenum in 1929. Stalin had decreed that local deviations from the party line be suppressed and that all loyal members move to set “class against class.” They were told to fight, not only capitalism, but also the labor movement. Since the Comintern had been founded to “accelerate the development of events toward world revolution,” the threat to established order everywhere was open. In London it was taken seriously; to conservative Englishmen the possibility of a Communist Britain seemed very real.

Several Tories with strong influence on their party’s leadership contemplated executing a momentous pivot in the history of British diplomacy. No one spoke of it publicly, nor was it whispered in the House of Commons smoking room. Even as theory, it was still in the fetal stage, and it might never come to term. Only a few Conservatives were committed to it. But others, including members of the party hierarchy, thought it had merit.

They pondered Benito Mussolini’s popularity in Italy, where, by 1932, he had been ruling for ten years. It had been a good decade for Italians.
Il Duce
’s dreams of building another Roman Empire evoked a tepid response, but his managed economy had prospered; his countrymen’s standard of living had risen. His goals, a biographer notes, had “a great appeal to many people in Italy in the years immediately following World War I; the Russian Revolution had terrified the leaders of the Italian financial and industrial community, and Mussolini’s program seemed to many of them to be an effective means of countering any similar development in their own country.”

British intelligence reported that in Germany, also suffering from the Depression, Adolf Hitler was following the Duce’s lead, presenting himself to the Ruhr’s
Schlotbarone
(smokestack barons) as a shield against the Reds. Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, “Nazi” for short—had remained obscure as long as the German economy flourished. Now the country’s industrialists, alarmed by the growing strength of communism in the working class, looked upon the Nazis with increasing approval.

At the time, the fear of Moscow was understandable. The Soviet Comintern, dedicated to the overthrow of other governments, was not just noisy; it was working, undermining the foundations of Western civilization from within. Communism was still new, virile, and virulent; cheerful tributes to it by leftists in the democracies drove democratic rightists, who were equally blind, toward Hitler. As T. R. Fehrenbach neatly states, “The Conservative Government of Great Britain, the one real order-keeping power in the world, was too intent upon the threatened social revolution to see the imminent nationalist revolt Hitler’s Germany was mounting against the democratic world.” They persuaded themselves, as Fehrenbach puts it, that a Germany ruled by Nazis could become “a counterpoise against the national and revolutionary ambitions of the Soviet Union.”
¹⁹

This was the rationale for the policy emerging in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay, of befriending the dictator states and appeasing their resentment of their postwar plight. The signs in Germany, to the men in high Tory councils, were encouraging. They pointed to the imminent establishment of a strong anti-Soviet regime in Berlin. Should that happen, they intended to befriend its leaders. Together, they believed, Englishmen and Germans had the stamina to forge a shield Comintern agents could never penetrate.

I
f Britain succeeded in courting Germany, His Majesty’s Government would have a lot of explaining to do, much of it to Englishmen who had been targets of Mausers and Krupp howitzers for four years and could never have prevailed without the gallant poilus who fought with them shoulder to shoulder, even when the Allied line nearly collapsed in the last spring of the war. An understanding with Berlin would mean the rejection of Britain’s fellow democracy. Questions in the House would be endless. But as the new men saw it, the time had come to put wartime bitterness aside. France, they felt, lacked vigor, determination, and sound business sense.

The French
were
exhausted. In
France même
—France outside Paris—the country was quiescent. The fertile northern provinces had been transformed into a wasteland of crumbling trenches and rusting barbed wire; over half the Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two—1,385,000—had been killed there between 1914 and 1918. The survivors were too maimed, or too feeble, to lift the tricolor in triumph. To be sure, the City of Light, the nation’s capital, still glowed. Under the chestnut trees of the Champs Élysées, fashion reporters who had penetrated the closely guarded private openings of the city’s grand couturiers forecast lower waists, straighter lines, fuller sleeves, and high, wide, and handsome shoulders. Hats were to be saucy: Arab fezzes, clown and cossack caps. Chanel would offer gloves of 18-karat spun gold, Regny an evening gown which could be converted into a bathing suit, and Rouff a naughty evening gown, with a zipper extending from the throat straight down to the bottom hem “for moonlight bathing,” or, as cynics pointed out, “swift coupling.”

In all world capitals it was assumed—it had, indeed, become a newspaper cliché—that France possessed “the finest army in the world.” In London those pushing for a divorce from Paris and a remarriage in Berlin spread rumors of plans for a French preemptive war against the new German state.
The Times
, possibly floating a trial balloon, warned: “In the years that are coming there is more reason to fear for Germany than to fear Germany.”
²⁰

Actually, confidence in the army of the Third Republic had been illusionary since 1917, when fifty-four French divisions—750,000 men—had mutinied. Officers had been beaten and even murdered; an artillery regiment had attempted to blow up the Schneider-Creusot munitions plant; trains had been derailed; 21,174 men deserted outright. Trenches were abandoned, and had the Germans known there was no one on the other side of no-man’s-land, they could have plunged through and won the war. The bitterness of the poilus survived the Armistice; their leaders told them their side had won, but they knew, in Churchill’s words, that victory had been “bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.”
²¹

Gallic military thinking was now wholly defensive. On January 4, 1930, both houses of the National Assembly had voted to build, on the Franco-German border, a great wall to be named for the minister of war, André Maginot. It would cost seven billion francs when completed in 1935. To be sure, the line did not protect the wooded Ardennes, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed fears for the forest: “
Elle est impénétrable
.” This judgment by the hero of Verdun was unchallenged. To young journalist William L. Shirer, arriving at the Arc de Triomphe in 1925, it seemed that “no other country on the Continent could challenge France’s supremacy. The nightmare of the German threat, which had haunted the French for so long, had been erased.” Their ancient foe, prostrate in defeat, its army reduced to a token force, its leadership “forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to build warplanes or tanks, or heavy guns or submarines or battleships, and saddled with the burden of reparations, was no longer a menace.”
²²

That, too, was illusion. Germany was not the Germany the Allies thought they had created at Versailles, and France seemed to be drifting into a strengthless
oubli
. Alistair Horne, the popular British historian, saw “the urge for national
grandeur
” replaced by “a deep longing simply to be left in peace.” In its capital, however, the mood quickened. It could be felt in the Café Flore and the Deux Magots, for example, the haunts of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir; in the
rêves fantastiques
of Jean Giraudoux and Jean Cocteau; in the Revue Nègre, the Ballet Suedois, the Ballet Russe, the extravagant theatre of Sergey Diaghilev, the fox trot
dansomanie
, Josephine Baker, Inkichinoff’s film
La Tête d’un homme
, the Prevert brothers’ film
L’Affaire est dans le sac
; and—the favorites of all the left-wing critics—the new stars Gilles and Julien, a pair of pacifist anarchists who performed in a Montmartre cabaret and then on the stage at Bobino’s, wearing black sweaters and making songs like “
Le Jeu de massacre
” instant hits after singing them just once. The manic mood, Horne wrote, was “Anything for
spectacle
.” This was the France of legend: the land of tumbling francs, tumbling governments, and saucy, tumbling
filles
.
²³

La Force de l’âge
(
The Prime of Life
), Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of the late 1920s and early 1930s, provides a more perceptive picture. Her depiction of French intellectuals contrasts starkly with the rising Nazi
Wildheit
in Berlin, where the excesses and decadence of the postwar decade were yielding to a flirtation, and then a lethal embrace, between philistinism and savagery. To be sure, there was ferocity in the French capital, too, as Communist gangs fought with members of the Croix de Feu, the Action Française, the Jeunesse Patriotes, and, later, Le Francisme, the most bizarre of the leagues. But they were a lunatic fringe; the intelligentsia considered them vulgar and so never mentioned them or even acknowledged their existence. “Peace seemed finally assured,” de Beauvoir wrote in the fall of 1929. She felt she was living in “a new ‘Golden Age,’ ” that the swelling of the Nazi ranks across the border was “a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance.” She, her lover Sartre, and their friends watched the Nazi seizure of power “quite calmly,” she later wrote, and while she briefly noted the Nazi expulsion of Einstein, she was more dismayed by the closing of Berlin’s Institute of Sexology.
²⁴

“We refused,” she later wrote, “to face the threat which Hitler’s behavior constituted to the world.” Henri Barbusse wrote in
Le Monde
that the Nazis could not possibly put Germany’s economy back on its feet; it was doomed, and after the collapse the German proletariat would reclaim its heritage.
Marianne
, a radical-socialist weekly, preached a steady pacifist line, coupled with announcements that if Hitler became chancellor he would soon be overthrown. In 1932 Romain Rolland drew up a manifesto, published in
Le Monde
and
Europe
and signed by André Gide, among others, which called upon all members of the French intelligentsia to vow “resistance against war.” Writers, thinkers, academicians, continued to predict—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—that the two nations were moving toward a Franco-German rapprochement. Every leftist, every intellectual, was shouting simultaneously: “Down with fascism!” and “Disarmament
NOW
!” Even as Germany’s army swelled with illegal recruits, France’s intelligentsia, de Beauvoir wrote, saw “no threat to peace”; the only danger was “the panic that the Right was spreading in France, with the aim of dragging us into war.” In 1914 “the whole of the intellectual elite, Socialists, writers, and all,” had “toed a wholly chauvinistic line.” Their lesson “forbade us to envisage the very possibility of a war.”
²⁵