Extrait
CHAPTER ONE
“WE MAY BE GOING TO DIE”
It had been a brilliant summer. On that point everyone agreed.
Children floated toy boats on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, while young lovers lay on deck chairs nearby and basked in the sunshine. At the Ritz, middle-aged women in flowered hats lunched on salmon and strawberries. In the evenings, crowds gathered outside stately mansions in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, as debutantes in satin and silk and young men in white tie and tails emerged from taxis and rushed, laughing, into the houses’ brightly lit interiors. In those brief seconds before the butler shut the door, spectators could hear the faint strains of “Love Walked In” or “Cheek to Cheek” and imagine, just for a moment, that they were young, titled, and rich, and whirling around on the dance floor.
There was racing at Goodwood and Ascot, cricket at Lord’s, tennis at Wimbledon, the regatta at Henley. There were dances and dinners, nightclub outings, and house parties in the country. But the highlight of the 1939 London season, in the opinion of those fortunate enough to have been invited, was the gala coming-out ball at Blenheim Palace for the seventeen-year-old Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. The palace’s massive stone facade had been floodlit for the occasion, its baroque beauty visible for miles. Tiny colored lights twinkled in the trees and shrubs of Blenheim’s twenty acres of gardens; its lake, also floodlit, seemed bathed in gold. A band played in a pavilion on the vast lawn, as footmen in powdered wigs and yellow and blue Marlborough livery handed out champagne to more than seven hundred guests, including Winston Churchill, who had been born at Blenheim and was a first cousin of the honored debutante’s late grandfather Sunny Marlborough. Most of those present danced until dawn. The scene, said one dazzled guest, was “gay, young, brilliant, in short, perfection.”
In that magical setting it was easy to forget that half a continent away, hundreds of thousands of German troops were massing on the borders of Poland, that in Warsaw residents were digging zigzag trenches in their parks while loudspeakers boomed out practice air-raid warnings. Europe stood on the brink of war. If Hitler invaded Poland, as seemed likely now, Britain had pledged to take up arms in defense of the Poles.
Yet as the summer wound down, there was little sense of crisis in that sea-girted country. Foreign visitors marveled at the calm of the British, their seeming insouciance in the face of peril. “Taxi-cab drivers, waiters and porters went about their work as though they were oblivious to the fact that soon they would be caught up in one of the greatest storms the world had ever known,” recalled Virginia Cowles, a young Boston socialite who had just begun work as a reporter for The Sunday Times, London. “The most you could get out of anyone was a short comment such as ‘Things aren’t too bright, are they?’ and you suddenly felt guilty of bad taste for having referred to it.”
For Helen Kirkpatrick, another young American reporter, living in England in the summer of 1939 was akin to driving a car and realizing you were about to crash. “Afterwards, when they pick you out of the wreck, you can tell them so clearly how you saw the other car coming headlong towards you, how you tried to turn aside but couldn’t quite make it,” Kirkpatrick, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wrote. “We knew it was coming–there it was ahead. Nothing could stop it. But life went on just the same as usual.”
Even with war looming, there would be no disruption of the social routine. The final days of July marked the end of the glittering season. By August 2 the annual late-summer exodus from London was well under way. Brighton and the other English seaside resorts were already jammed. Members of the upper class were en route to their country estates for a bit of grouse shooting or to the beaches and casinos of southern France. As one society matron explained to her debutante granddaughter, “Darling, the thing is: one [shouldn’t] be seen in London after July 31.”
Neville Chamberlain prepared to follow his countrymen’s example. Bone-weary, the seventy-year-old British prime minister was looking forward to a few weeks of salmon fishing in the Scottish Highlands. But before he could make his escape, he had one last duty on his schedule: to preside over the formal adjournment of Parliament for its traditional two-month summer break.
A number of members of Parliament, however, were appalled at the idea of a long vacation. This was not, after all, a typical desultory August. War could break out at any moment. What on earth was the prime minister thinking? Was he trying to get Parliament out of the way so he could renege on Britain’s promises to the Poles? Chamberlain had seemed unequivocal in March, when he pledged to defend Poland against German aggression. Yet disquieting reports were circulating of intense British pressure on the Poles to make concessions to Germany, of secret talks with German officials about a possible deal. According to The New York Times, London and Paris were now privately warning Poland not to antagonize Hitler. And earlier in the summer, when Polish officials sought credits from Britain for arms, they were told by the Treasury that the matter was not considered “of great urgency.”
To some MPs, such reports were unpleasantly reminiscent of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany a year earlier. Was he now preparing to betray the Poles as he had betrayed the Czechs at the Munich Conference the year before? The prime minister’s decision to embark on his personal diplomatic missions to Hitler in September 1938 had violated all precedent, having been made without consulting his own cabinet, much less the House of Commons. Indeed, when Chamberlain began his pilgrimages to Germany, Parliament was in its two-month summer recess, a fact that anti-appeasement MPs remembered only too well in August 1939. The House of Commons, representing the British people, was supposed to guide and control the executive. Instead, complained the Conservative MP Harold Macmillan, “we are being treated more and more like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government of the day.
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