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I labour for peace, but when I speak unto them thereof they make them ready to battle.

6TH VERSE OF PSALM CXX OF

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

It was the stationmaster at Grantham who finally overcame my scruples about the writing of this book. Mr. Gardner was kind enough to invite me into his office, where there was a fire, one cold morning when I was waiting for a train for London, which was late. We spoke of this and that, about the war and its origins; and his final remark to me was that he and people like him knew nothing of the facts of the case.

I have attempted in this volume, the main purpose of which is historical, to give the facts of the case; and to those who read it I should wish, first of all, to make it quite clear that, whereas all the observations, comments, and opinions expressed in this volume are purely personal and therefore fallible and controversial, the sequence of events and the facts themselves are taken entirely from telegrams, dispatches, and letters written at the time, and are consequently, humanly speaking, strictly exact.

In a book of this nature, written so soon after the events recorded therein, there must necessarily be certain reticences. In the first place, I occupied an official position at Berlin, and was then, and still am, in the service of His Majesty’s Government.

In the second place, if circumstances had been normal, nothing would have induced me to write—at least at this early stage—about people who had so recently been uniformly courteous and hospitable to me personally.

Unfortunately, circumstances are not normal; and, whatever my personal inclinations may be, I have felt that, having regard to the fact that it is British public opinion which ultimately determines the character of our foreign policy, it is my duty to give to the people of this country an account of my stewardship of the mission which was entrusted to me by the King in April, 1937, as his Ambassador at Berlin.

The first commandment of a diplomatist is faithfully to interpret the views of his own government to the government to which he is accredited; and the second is like unto it: namely, to explain no less accurately the views and standpoint of the government of the country in which he is stationed to the government of his own country.

The first commandment is much easier to keep than the second; and its fulfillment can, or should, be taken for granted. The second is sometimes far more difficult of performance. I went to Berlin resolved, in spite of my own doubts and apprehensions and in spite of many of its detestable aspects, to do my utmost to see the good side of the Nazi regime as well as the bad, and to explain as objectively as I could its aspirations and viewpoint to His Majesty’s Government. Hitler and the Nazi party governed Germany, and with them it was my duty to work. But above all, I was determined to labor for an honorable peace and to follow the example of the Prime Minister in never wearying of that labor.

For two years I hoped against hope that the Nazi revolution, having run its course, would revert to a normal and civilized conduct of internal and international life, that there was a limit to Hitler’s ambitions and a word of truth in some at least of his assurances and statements. Many may regard my persistence as convicting me of the lack of any intellectual understanding of Nazi or even German mentality. That may be true; but even today I do not regret having tried to believe in Germany’s honor and good sense. Whatever happens, I shall always persist in thinking that it was right to make the attempt, that nothing was lost by making it, but that, on the contrary, we should never have entered upon this war as a united Empire and nation, with the moral support of neutral opinion behind us, if the attempt had not been made. Anyway, the fact remains that up to the fifteenth of March, 1939, and in spite of the shocks of Godesberg and Munich in 1938, I refused to abandon that hope. After the occupation of Prague on the Ides of last March I still struggled on, though all hope, except in a miracle, was dead.

No miracle occurred, and on September 1st the German armies and Air Force invaded Poland. There was no declaration of war, and a clearer case of unprovoked aggression there can never be. Indeed, in spite of all my hopes and efforts, it is possible now to say that for a year and a half before that date I had been obsessed with the idea that we were moving remorselessly through the pages of a Greek tragedy to its inevitably disastrous and sinister end. Those who take the trouble to read this book will realize what I mean. Hitler never intended the ultimate end to be other than war. It seems inconceivable that the will and lust for power of one man should plunge an unwilling Europe into war. But so it is; and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have to suffer and to die for it. So long as Germany, the home of the most numerous, disciplined, and hard-working race in Europe, is governed by Hitler and his secret police (Gestapo) and by all that Hitlerism stands for, there can be no confidence in international agreements and no civilized conduct in national and international life.

That is my profound conviction after living in the Germany of Hitler for over two years. I like and admire the German people; I feel myself very much at home among them and find them less strangers than almost any other foreign people. A prosperous, contented, and happy Germany is a vital British interest. But today the Germans are serving a false god, and their many good and great qualities are being debauched for ends which are evil. Germany can neither be prosperous nor happy till she recovers her individual and personal freedom of life and thought and has learned that the true responsibility of strength is to protect and not to oppress the weak.

I have lived abroad for a third of a century. The last year in which I spent as much as six months in England was 1905. In December of that year I was sent to my first post at St. Petersburg. Since then I have never spent more than four months in England in any one year, generally much less; and in the course of some years I have never returned to England at all. Yet, whenever I do so, I am always struck by the fundamental common sense, sound judgment, and critical faculty of the great mass of the British people, of John Citizen and Jane Citizeness in their simplest form. Never was I more impressed by this than in September of this year and in the months which preceded the declaration of war. I may tell of my personal experiences at Berlin during the past two years; but nothing in such a record can add to, or detract from, the instinctive appreciation by the British public of the realities of the struggle upon which we have now entered.

There is no material gain in it for ourselves. True to our own spirit of freedom, we are fighting for the moral standards of civilized life, in the full realization of our responsibilities and of the cost which we must pay for shouldering them. All that is best in this generation of the British nation, and particularly of its youth, has dedicated itself to the higher cause of humanity in the future; and it is in humble recognition of that marvelous fact that I myself dare to dedicate this book to the people of the British Isles, to the men and women of its streets and factories, shores and countrysides.

Rauceby Hall,

Sleaford.

October, 1939.