Free Memoirs of a Private Man by Winston Graham Page A

paper shop in Perranporth and seeing the headline: ‘ Germany Walks Out of the League of Nations’. It was Harvest Festival at Perranzabuloe Parish Church that day. A strange harvest. From that moment I never really believed the end could be anything but war. The black cloud of inevitability hung over the next six years.
    For ten years after 1918 people were sick of war and wanted to hear no more of it, but later the mood changed and everyone wrote about it and everyone read it. For a decade the British people, and no doubt people everywhere, had been deluged with accounts of the last war, in autobiographies, in novels, in films, in plays. Films like H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1936) predicted what would happen when the next war broke out. And everywhere where pictures could be seen we saw the marching Germans, the massed battalions on parade, Hitler screaming his revenge and hate.
    Germany had been looked on with great sympathy during the early days of the post-war time. The Versailles Treaty had made her appear the sinned against rather than the sinning, and the reaction against the old wartime propaganda was notable in any company. After the Second World War France was bitterly criticized by later historians, who presumably were in the kindergarten at the time, for not sending French troops into the Rhineland when Hitler unilaterally occupied it. Had they done so, it is argued, Hitler would have fallen and the Second World War possibly been prevented. But had France done this – depriving the poor Germans of land which everyone agreed was their own – whether Hitler had fallen or not, France would have become a pariah among nations. The howl of execration from the entire British press would have been echoed throughout the world. Hitler, even if he temporarily fell, would have been re-elected by a mass vote of the German people, to whom he would have suddenly become a hero. For France, it was a no-win situation whatever happened.
    Opposed to the later Hitler, the more triumphant Hitler, with his ‘Strength through Joy’ movements, his Youth Corps, his millions of healthy, vigorous, industrious, mindless young men, all pledged to live – or die – for the Führer, what had we to offer? Love on the Dole, hunger marches, Peace Pledge Unions, ‘Will-not-fight-forthe-Country’ motions, disarmament rallies, grey elderly politicians hesitating and dithering, a general and an understandable hatred of things military. Even the air races which fathered the Spitfire had to be funded privately. I remember a prominent member of the League of Nations Union coming to Cornwall and pleading that the Government should scrap just one more cruiser, so that the US and Japan might be softened in their claim for parity. I remember the Baldwin election in which, lying in his teeth that he was devoted to disarmament, he immediately on re-election began a very modest rearmament programme. He said, truly, that if he had not so lied he would never have been re-elected to do even that.
    Curiously, the television series which has brought back that nightmare time most vividly to me was Fortunes of War , from the Olivia Manning novels. Watching it, one remembered the utter frustrated helplessness of the whole of Europe before the ruthless, disciplined, relentless brutality of the Hitler jackboot.
    Many in England as late as 1938 wished to make peace, at almost any price. The Munich Agreement, denounced as a sell-out – as indeed it was – united the British people as they had never been before it, and gave them a priceless year in which to rearm.
    It can of course be argued that a later generation grew up under a worse shadow, that of a nuclear war. The difference lay in the inevitability. And to some extent in one’s assessment of the Russian character. I had far more to lose in the Fifties than in the Thirties, but I never felt a tenth of the same oppressive, apprehensive