If Hitler Comes Read Online Free

Territories, naturally , were to be handed back; but in any case there was to be an “open door” all round, British capital being as free to develop Galicia as German traders to establish themselves on the Gold Coast. There was a lot about “cultural exchanges ”, and—most ominous of all—a Press pact, by which neither Government would permit its newspapers to attack the other country’s political institutions. Lastly, there was something about eternal peace.
    Exclamations expressive of varying degrees of surprise, excitement, and dismay accompanied the departing diplomats, and then we all began to shout and gesticulate at once. I can remember feeling rather helpless, with a dim idea that, since the ineluctable processes of history had produced this inevitable document, one could only wait to see what would happen next.
    But a journalist must get his story. A thousand questions were waiting to be asked; and there was a rush to consult Billings or some other official of the Press Department. But Billings looked as bewildered as the rest of us. He said there was nothing to add. The treaty spoke for itself, and in any case the Prime Minister would be broadcasting during the evening.
    The American who shared my taxi back to Fleet Street was voluble and incoherent. Like me, he must send a message at once, and he was equally at a loss for “a line”. He muttered conflicting clichés , varying from “Hitler’s Paper Triumph” to “The Beginning of the End”.
    “Who can tell what it means?” he asked despairingly. “A people like this cannot be robbed of their birthright by a hole-and-corner rendezvous at nine on a Sunday morning.
    “I am beginning to think it amounts to very little, really,” he went on, as the cab cut the corner of Trafalgar Square. “The return of the colonies is the only concrete clause in it; and that was expected. The rest just flatters Hitler’s vanity—lets him link arms with a respectable old aggressor like your British Empire. You have got to live side by side in your respective spheres, and there is no harm in drawing up a nice, neighbourly contract in black and white.”
    He laughed, probably because he knew he was talking nonsense.
    The bells of the few Wren churches in the City which had survived the second “Great Fire” were keeping up tradition by summoning to prayer the inhabitants of an unslept-in part of London. The few people in the streets were walking westwards, feeling that the rumours of Saturday night might find some visual expression in the neighbourhood of Downing Street. The special editions were not yet on the streets. A London Sunday morning was still nearly its old, blank self.
    Our taximan, however, had heard something of what had happened, and displayed a mild interest in it. When he was being paid he remarked: “So they’ve been signing another treaty down in Whitehall, have they, gentlemen? Well, after that Nuremberg business, I suppose they might as well make a proper job of it.”
    What, I wondered, was Hitler’s notion of a proper job? After I had sent my first startling cablegram I sat back for a moment, and my eye lighted on an old wartime copy of an illustrated paper. On the cover was a portrait of the Führer, his little eyes glowing with an inexhaustible fanaticism; and inside were some rather unpleasant pictures, smuggled out of Prague.
    The tide of excitement soon began to rise, and by dusk the streets and clubs were full. On the whole, to my surprise, it was a pleasurable excitement, and the impression began to gain ground that the Government had cleverly averted another tiresome crisis in cutting the Gordian knot and frankly acknowledging the interdependence of the two greatest Powers in the world. Leader writers were busy describing this “great new experiment in international relations”, and one of them was tactless enough (but positively on this occasion only) to write of “new opportunities for the civilizing influence of Great