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It seemed brighter no doubt to the Japanese who were making merry hell in China, amidst flaming cities, and the red glare of ruins in which were the crowded bodies of their victims, killed in heaps by bombing aeroplanes and machine-gun fire and Japanese bayonets. Shanghai, Pekin, Nankin, and many other cities where civilisation had dwelt long ago, were captured by little men who have learnt to make and handle all the machines of the Western armies but have an Oriental disregard of death, a fanatical courage exalted by a passionate joy in sacrifice.

I heard a prophecy about them some time ago. It was from a very wise old man who knew almost everything about foreign affairs. His name was Cardinal Gasparri, once Secretary of State to the Vatican, which is well informed on these subjects.

“Shall I tell you what is the real danger for Europe?” asked this old gentleman, in a black gown with a red sash and a red skull cap, who stood under the glimmer of light from a candelabra in a Roman salon peering at me with watery eyes because of his great age.

We had been discussing the dangers to European civilisation, not least of which, he thought, was the rearmament of all the nations suspicious and afraid.

“Japan,” he reminded me, “has captured Manchuria. Next she will dominate China. There will be six hundred million Asiatics under discipline. A Japanese gentleman said to me the other day: ‘When that happens Europe will have to be careful.’ ... That is true. Europe will have to be careful! It is better that the European nations stand together. It is indeed urgently necessary. Even now Japanese competition is becoming irresistible in the world’s markets. The Japanese labourer works ten hours a day for ten sous an hour. What can we do against that? His cheap production has already destroyed England’s cotton industry in the East. Meanwhile European nations are quarrelling and rearming for another war. That is the way of suicide. It is very unwise, don’t you think?”

Those words were spoken in 1934. Three years later the same warning was given more urgently by the oldest and youngest of our Generals whom I have the honour of knowing. It is Sir Ian Hamilton who at 84 years of age looks upon the world with keen eyes, an ardent spirit, and great knowledge.

“It is time,” he said, “that Europe gets together to defend itself against a greater danger than any in its midst. What are we going to do about the Japanese?”

That invasion of China by the Japanese is one of the milestones in human history ranking with the early invasion of Europe by Eastern races or with the Roman advance into Gaul, or the tidal wave of German hordes against the Roman Empire, or the coming of Genghis Khan westwards. For it may be the beginning of a new era in the Pacific and of a new power rising in the East eager for conquest and for domination over four hundred million people who may be militarised by their masters and made efficient by them. What then, O Lord?

Years ago I asked a friend of mine how he thought things would shape out in the unknown future.

He was a man worth asking because of the little grey cells in his high dome.

“It’s all cut and dried,” he told me. “The Japanese will conquer the Chinese. The Chinese will absorb them after learning their technique. They will spread over the Western world. They will adopt Christianity. There will be a Chinese Pope in Rome.”

I do not accept that view of the future! It is too dreadful a dream. But even as an allegory it has a frightful warning of things to come. In any case the immediate present is alarming enough to Western peoples who have trade interests and many possessions in China and other lands washed by the Pacific Ocean.

The Japanese have succeeded in their invasion of China with a success which intoxicates them. They chose their time well. Those Europeans, they thought, were too involved in their own fears, in their own stupidities, to take action for the defence of their interests in China. What would their words of protest matter? What did they matter when Japanese air-pilots bombed British and American gunboats and machine-gunned their crews? An Oriental apology was enough. The British Fleet would not go far from the North Sea or the Mediterranean when Germany and Italy were causing anxiety. Japan was very happy to belong to a Berlin-Rome Pact against Communism, which was another name for Russia. If Russia tried to move, Germany would move. In any case Russia had killed all her best Generals, and the new Czar, whose name was Stalin, was executing almost everybody of any importance. Russia was just a madhouse and a shambles. The Japanese had no fear from that quarter.

What about the United States? Supposing they joined up with Great Britain? Was there any chance of that? Little Japanese gentlemen acting as waiters in New York, as clerks in shipping offices, as students in American Universities, or as special correspondents and private spies, had all sent home reports informing their superior officers that the American people were isolationists and non-interventionists and would refuse to be forced into war with Japan or to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” (an American expression) for the British.

The military academies of the United States had for years been putting a problem to their students as an academic exercise worked out on a map covering a large floor-space. What could the American Navy do if the Japanese Fleet seized the Philippines? How could they attack the Japanese, shielded behind a network of islands and surrounded by mine-fields? No solution had been found for that problem.

Not long ago I discussed this Eastern menace with a man who has an intimate knowledge of China and has made a special study of Far-Eastern problems. He is a German, and our conversation, rather grim, was illumined by little candles on Christmas cakes. A young man played the ’cello to us and afterwards there was the laughter of two merry ladies. It was a little sanctuary of civilisation in the great jungle.

“The Japanese,” said my friend, “are getting ready to press southwards. That is the direction of their destiny as they believe. Manchuria is no use to them for colonial settlement. The climate is too severe. It does not hold the wealth they want. Their attack upon China was not to conquer that vast country for their future home. They only wish to force their trade on the Chinese people and keep them under control so that they will not be a hostile power in collusion with Western nations when Japan reaches southwards for what they want—the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya with its inexhaustible reserves of wealth in tin and rubber and many good things. The British Empire and its immense interests in the East are gravely threatened.”

The same ideas, in almost the same words, were expressed to me with obvious anxiety by another friend of mine just back from Malaya after many previous visits to that country where he has rubber plantations.

“If the Japanese aren’t checked,” he said, “Malaya will be their goal. I’m getting very worried about it. We shall have to look out for ourselves. So will the Dutch. But what are we going to do if the danger in the Mediterranean keeps our Fleet on this side of the world?”

That was the question discussed most anxiously by the British Cabinet at the beginning of last year. Among them was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a youngish handsome man, who was looking older since he had been given that high office when he tried, and failed, to stop a war in Abyssinia. Since then not a day had passed for him without sharp anxieties of new threats to peace and a further crumbling down of all that he was trying to prop up—that system of Collective Security—upon which he had banked so heavily. That had all gone now. In its stead was collective insecurity. That Spanish civil war had given him a few grey hairs. It had been the cockpit of all the passions and “ideologies”—that frightful word!—and blind, stupid, dangerous fanaticisms which had taken possession of many minds and many groups. It had very nearly caused another world war. He had held that spectre at bay only by a patient game of delay and a policy of non-intervention nearly wrecked by hotheads.

British Foreign Policy, for which he was partly responsible, had failed all along the line. Mussolini had got away with Abyssinia. Germany had played a strong hand and won most of the tricks. Russia, for whom he said kind words now and then, was not a good ally for the last democracies. A man-eating tiger would inspire more confidence. The whole of Europe was in a state of flux and new nations set up by the Peace Treaties were drifting away from those who had brought them into being. They were being pulled towards the German orbit. Now there was this Japanese conquest of China directly challenging British interests of vital importance, insulting the British flag, bombing British ships, threatening British possessions. A very dangerous world for a Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs who was aware that, like Agag, he must walk delicately over the thin crust that was always breaking beneath his feet with threatening cracks above the bottomless pit. Mr. Anthony Eden resigned his job when a new Prime Minister named Neville Chamberlain decided to patch up those cracks before we all went down.