Fate as Choice

ON BORROWED TIME by Leonard Mosley. 509 pages. Random House. $8.95.

The major defeat in any war is the fact that it started in the first place. Certainly, little that occurred during World War II seems more terrible in retrospect than the blunders that led up to it--not only at Versailles but during the deadly political charade that immediately preceded 1939. Neville Chamberlain tap-tapping to Munich with his umbrella, Hitler screaming hatred from peaceful Berchtesgaden--these cliche figures still have a power to disturb that few living villains can match.

British Journalist-Novelist Leonard Mosley (Hirohito: Emperor of Japan; TIME, July 1, 1966) left his Berlin newspaper beat on Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland. At this remote date, he has little new to add by way of fact or interpretation to a subject summed up in his subtitle as "How World War II Began." But he is a first-rate memoirist. His service lies in reconstructing the mesmerized mood of the late 1930s, when Hitler taught those statesmen who tried to reason with him a ghastly object lesson in shattered complacency.

Among the Allied leaders, Chamberlain bears the brunt of the author's j'accuse. Mosley does not disagree with the political opponent who judged the Prime Minister only qualified to serve as "lord mayor of Birmingham in a bad year." In the witty image of Diplomat-Author Harold Nicolson, Chamberlain may have looked like a curate entering a pub for the first time, but he was sneaky enough, says Mosley, to trick Anthony Eden into resigning as Foreign Minister and, as late as the summer of 1939, to make fumbling secret overtures to the Germans without informing the French or even his own Foreign Office. Chamberlain's supreme stupidity was to treat his friends like enemies and his enemies like friends.

Mosley recreates a climate of haplessness. French Premier Edouard Daladier, Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes and even Mussolini seemed as out of step with history as Chamberlain. They were obsolete men (in the McLuhan sense) when compared to an eerily turned-on Hitler. Czechoslovakia, with a modern air force and a well-trained army, put up no resistance. It was, alas, Poland that stood firm: the only trouble was, as Mosley observes, "When the Poles saber-rattled it was actually sabers they were rattling."

With near-perfect mistiming, Daladier panicked and Chamberlain crumbled when Hitler was bluffing, as in the 1938 confrontation over the Sudetenland, which led to the Munich sellout. On the other hand, less than a month before the outbreak of World War II, Chamberlain was placidly grouse shooting in Scotland. Almost to the end, the old Tory was more indignant about radicals at home than fascists abroad.

Mosley often trivializes history by reducing it, for example, to a matter of Chamberlain's gout or Hitler's bad breath. He also overplays that luxury sport of historians, the what-if game: "If a certain Virgil Tilea hadn't had a large and stimulating lunch on March 16, 1939, Britain and France might not have been at war with Germany on September 3."*

In the end, Mosley carries his argument: that history provided moments of decision, and most of the choices were flubbed--out of stupidity, cowardice and petty self-interest. Churchill's words after Munich today read flamboyant but true: "The government had to choose between shame and war. They chose shame and they will get war." Curiously, Hitler once pointed to the same moral--that one's character finally becomes one's destiny. When he discovered how formidable the Czech bunkers might have proved, he said: "What does it matter how strong the concrete is so long as the will is weak?"

Mosley is careful not to say that World War II could have been avoided. He is also cautious about suggesting alternative lines of action. His scenario is not what should have been done but what was done. His interest is to show that generally it was deplorable.

All public tragedies tend to become cautionary tales. Survivors of Munich have learned a lesson by heart: appeasement is a loser's game. But today, most men are not so sure as they once were of just what constitutes "appeasement"--or whether a policy of "get tough" is a winner's game either. Still, if the tactical lessons of Munich seem less and less simple to apply, its moral implications are not. The tragic events of history, so often in retrospect accepted as inevitable, were shaped by human will and wisdom--or the lack of them.

*Tilea, Rumanian minister in London, was encouraged, probably by a Tory foreign affairs expert, to believe that his country was next on Hitler's list. This fear, passed on to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, stirred the somnolent British Cabinet to diplomatic action, which took the form of a mutual-defense pact with Poland.

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