The Pursuit of Laughter (33 page)

English politicians were wonderfully ignorant of European history and Chamberlain spoke but the bare truth when he said Czechoslovakia was a far-away country of which they knew little. The same applied to Poland, guaranteed in 1939, that the prophecy of Lloyd George in 1919 might be fulfilled when he pointed on the map to the Polish
corridor
and said: ‘Here is where the next war will start.’

For members of parliament, to declare war on Germany was the answer to many things. All the great neglected domestic problems of the day, unemployment, housing, poverty, were solved at a stroke. ‘There’s a war on’ was sufficient answer to any complaint, however pressing. None of them had to bother his head about a general election, a major worry which had been looming near.

Thus the great disaster hit mankind. More than fifty million are estimated to have died, some in battle, some murdered, some starved, some burnt alive with fire bombs or
annihilated
by atom bombs. After what the author calls the Russo-American victory half of Europe was occupied by Soviet Russia, and thirty years on there are Russian tanks in Prague. England, under Churchill who loved the British Empire and detested socialism, had been reduced to poverty-stricken impotence. As this book demonstrates, Churchill’s coalition ensured socialism’s electoral success; and Churchill himself recognised that the war had gone awry when he called his own book
Triumph and Tragedy
. He lived to witness the end of the Empire.

Oswald Mosley is denounced for predicting ‘collapse’, but he has unfortunately been proved right in the event. (As to the insulting suggestion that Mosley would in some way have benefited from a German occupation of England, it is enough to say that from 1932 he never ceased to press for rearmament, and that given his character and record it is impossible to imagine him as the lackey of a foreign power.) He foresaw that whatever the outcome war would be disastrous for Britain.

The author makes extensive and subtle use of inverted commas, often with hilarious effect. An example: ‘Halifax’s “soul” had “risen in indignation” against Mussolini’s “crimes” in Abyssinia’. Written thus, the soul and the crimes appear equally dubious.

It may be a mistake to refer to people by their surnames alone. While there was only one Hitler, there were in those days two Macmillans, two Morrisons, two Chamberlains, two MacDonalds; as to the Wilsons, not only were there Horace and Arnold but there is a reference to ‘Wilsonism’ which relates to Woodrow of blessed memory. Another
oddity
is the disregard of double names. Few, without a glance at the index, will guess that Monsell and Croft are Eyres-Monsell and Page-Croft. Unimportant? Yes; but if they are to be mentioned, the names they were known by might as well be used. The same applies to Hart, generally known as Liddell Hart: it would be too bad if some callow
undergraduate
were to imagine that Hart refers to Judith, or that one of the Wilsons was Harold, or that ‘Wilsonism’ meant galloping inflation.

The author’s brilliantly interesting book costs £15; this is a steep price but it is worth every penny.

The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940
, Cowling, M.
Books and Bookmen
(1975)

‘Two farmyard pigs and a wild boar’ was the comment of de Gaulle on the photograph of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference—a photograph which has lately been seen again, illustrating an article about this book entitled
The Day We Lost the Peace
. They are sitting together in the sunshine; Sir Winston in a ‘funny’ fur hat, smoking a cigar, is beaming at the other two who look in his direction—Roosevelt, hatless, wearing a
theatrical
cloak and vacant expression, and Stalin, dressed in his plain uniform. The
proximity
of the two politicians in fancy dress does not, as might be supposed, make him too look ridiculous, but rather the reverse. Because he is the wild boar.

Sir Winston has called this last volume of his account of the Second World War
Triumph and Tragedy
; unfortunately his triumph was transitory, but the tragedy persists. He begins, however, on the triumphant note to which we became so accustomed during the war. It is D Day; the Allies are advancing; he is having the time of his life. ‘I had a jolly day on Monday on the beaches and inland,’ he wrote to Roosevelt on 14 June, 1944. ‘We are working up to a battle which may well be a million a side… How I wish you were here!’ He sang Rule Britannia in a wardroom, visited the ruins of Caen, stayed at Arromanches: ‘They wanted to call the harbour “Port Churchill.” But this for various reasons I forbade.’

In one of Sir Winston’s favourite expressions, the Hun was being made to bleed and burn on all fronts. The Red Army was advancing from the East. ‘Every victory that you gain is watched with eager attention here,’ he wrote to Stalin. ‘This is the moment for me to tell you how immensely we are all here impressed with the magnificent advances of the Russian armies.’

Best of all, he was able to ‘go into action’ on one of His Majesty’s ships, the
destroyer
Kelvin. ‘Admiral Vian… proposed that we should go and watch the bombardment of the German position… Accordingly we passed between the two battleships, which were firing at twenty thousand yards… and soon we were within seven or eight thousand yards of the shore, which was thickly wooded. The bombardment was leisurely and continuous, but there was no reply from the enemy. As we were about to turn I said to Vian, “Since we are so near, why shouldn’t we have a plug at them ourselves before we go home?” He said “Certainly,” and in a minute or two all our guns fired on the silent coast. We were, of course, well within the range of their artillery, and the moment we had fired Vian made the destroyer turn about and depart at the highest speed. We were soon out of danger and passed through the cruiser and battleship lines.’ No doubt as they sped away from the silent wooded shore he made a whole series of V signs—a gesture of defiance to the
continent
of Europe upon which he was soon to inflict such fatal wounds.

His finest hour was sweet, but very short. Already, with unconditional surrender almost a year away, a black cloud loomed, a worrying, nagging thought that almost
succeeded
in spoiling the sport of that exhilarating, victory-laden summer. What would the wild boar do, once he had been let into the garden?

‘Evidently we are approaching a show-down with the Russians about their intrigues in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece. I think their attitude becomes more difficult every day.’ This was a minute addressed to the Foreign Secretary. Strange words to use about our ally, who was fighting the Hun with all his might, and was now approaching the Polish frontier. It was almost five years since we had declared war on Germany in order to free Poland from the invader, but apart from setting up an
émigré
Polish government in London and
allowing
Polish soldiers and airmen to fight with our armies, England, for geographical reasons, had not been able to implement the guarantee given in 1939. But now our Russian ally was advancing into Poland, which was about to be liberated and take its place once more among the free and democratic nations.

Reviewing this book, the
Times Literary Supplement
commented on the single,
unpolitical
, war-aim of the author—to win the war. Clausewitz said that war is the pursuance of political ends by other means. To Sir Winston the means and the end were so confused that he apparently had no other thought in his head than the defeat of Hitler. He seems to have imagined that once this was accomplished there would be a Peace Conference, and Europe would assume its pre-1933 aspect, with Germany enjoying the blessings of democracy and mass unemployment, while the League of Nations was hard at work once more in Geneva. It was not until the summer of 1944 that the fatality of his policy began to dawn upon him, and even then his enjoyment of the triumph often obscured his vision of the approaching tragedy. Those who had warned were silenced; foresight in this
matter
had been strictly forbidden.

In order to defeat Hitler he was prepared to cast away the wealth and strength of England and see her reduced to a second rate power. That was not all: English honour was held to be involved in the liberation of Poland; yet after the efforts and sacrifices of a six years war Poland is not free. ‘The Germans are a cold in the head but Russia is the pox’ is an old Polish saying; the massacres of Katyn and what happened in Warsaw were not
likely
to change this opinion. Readers of
Triumph and Tragedy
know the end of the story, and so did Sir Winston when he wrote the book. It is a piece of special pleading; he wishes to show the world how great was the effort he made during the last year of the war to avoid the results of his colossal errors of judgment. But however hard he tries to shift
responsibility
, it falls back upon him.

As long as his war-aim was to ‘kill Germans’ it was all straightforward. Not only did England and America pour arms into Russia; they also provided arms and money to ‘Communist banditti’ as Sir Winston calls them, wherever they might be, if they would promise to kill Germans too. (The fact that these ‘Partisans’ put the arms to other uses as
well was one of the reasons for the great unpopularity of their English and American benefactors in Europe after the war.) It did not matter whether those killed were soldiers, or even men, so long as they were German. A few weeks before the end of the war, Dresden, an open city full to overflowing with refugees, provided an opportunity for
making
them bleed and burn in their tens of thousands. The farmyard creatures were
determined
to show that they were in no way behind the wild boar when it came to being ‘tough’; the bombing of Dresden had no other object, since it did not affect the course of the war.

In the summer of 1944 grave doubts as to the intentions of Russia began to loom, doubts which became certainties after the Warsaw rising. Sir Winston tells the story in full; the Russian wireless appeal to the Poles in Warsaw to rise against the Germans, now that their liberators were at the gates, how they bravely did so, encouraged by the sound of Russian guns on the outskirts of the city, how the Russians then halted their advance, and gave the Germans several weeks in which to put down the rising, refusing all help to the desperate Poles and even forbidding English and American aeroplanes to land with
supplies
on the airfields within reach.

Thus (again for geographical reasons) were the Poles for the second time buoyed up with promises which could not be kept. Stalin achieved his object—Poland minus its
fighting
men was easier to occupy and has since been no trouble to rule.

This chapter, The Martyrdom of Warsaw, might well have been called instead The Result of England’s Guarantee of Poland. On the 30 August General Smuts wrote to Sir Winston as follows:

It is hard to say whether Smuts meant the last sentence sarcastically; it was already plain that, whatever might be said of his experience, the Prime Minister’s influence was pure illusion. He had summoned up the barbarian from the East and the simpleton from the West—Europe meant nothing to the latter; it meant riches, plunder and power to the
former
.
He could write and telegraph to Stalin every day, he could sometimes persuade Roosevelt to join in his appeals, but it made no difference whatever. He did his best. He told Field-Marshal Alexander, still fighting in Northern Italy, ‘if the war came to an end at an early date… to be ready for a dash with armoured cars’—a dash for Vienna, to
forestall
the Russians. ‘Difficult as the world is now,’ he wrote to the Foreign Secretary, ‘we shall not make our course easier by abandoning people whom we have encouraged by promises of support’; while to Tito he said, ‘we had no desire to intervene in internal Yugoslav affairs, but…we ought not to let the King down.’ Seemingly bewildered by the difficult world, minutes, memoranda and telegrams flowed from his pen while the
people
whom he had encouraged by promises of support were, in fact, abandoned one after another.