Before the invasion, the Poles had estimated that they could hold for three months; now three weeks sounded like an optimistic prediction.

The reports from Paris were also worrying. The French appeared to be chasing the Italian mediation offer with unseemly haste. Paris had set only one precondition for talks: an armistice, with German troops halting in place. London was demanding a German withdrawal to the Polish border. Just before noon, Halifax instructed Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, to infuse some “courage and determination into M. [Georges] Bonnet,” the French foreign minister. This was easier said than done. Bonnet, the leader of the antiwar faction in the government of Édouard Daladier, combined the slipperiness of an eel with the “cunning of a fox on alert.” In its brief life, the Italian offer would die numerous deaths, and each time Bonnet would find a way to resuscitate it—sometimes with guile and cunning, other times with outright lies. When Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, called Halifax at 2:30 p.m. on September 2, he said he had just spoken to Bonnet, who had assured him “that if Hitler would suspend hostilities and agree in principle to a conference . . . Great Britain and France would participate.” Halifax told Ciano that he had been misinformed.

Two hours later, Bonnet called the Foreign Office. Hitler had agreed to study the Italian proposal under French terms—the German Army halts in place. Halifax said the French terms were unacceptable; Britain would not agree to mediation unless Germany withdrew from Poland. That would be desirable, certainly, Bonnet said, but why should a German withdrawal be an essential precondition? The important thing was to convince the French and British publics that their governments had made every effort to save the peace. Halifax promised to present Bonnet’s views to the cabinet.

As the hot, sultry September afternoon moved toward evening, consternation and alarm grew in the House of Commons. Thirty-six hours had passed since the German attack on Poland, and Britain and France continued to quibble over terms and deadlines. When the prime minister’s 3:00 p.m. speech was postponed to 6:00 p.m. without explanation, the bar in the Commons smoking room began to fill with rumors, each growing more lurid as the consumption of alcohol increased. It was said that Bonnet had told the Polish ambassador to France, “You don’t expect us to have a massacre of women and children in Paris.” It was said that Premier Daladier had gone “wobbly.” It was said that the French wanted to give Germany a full week to reply to an Allied ultimatum; and as the September light faded from the late-summer sky and the alcohol continued to flow in the smoking room, it was proposed, only half in jest, that “Britain declare war on France.”

When Churchill arrived in the smoking room late on the afternoon of the second, he was already ripping mad at the French. Earlier in the day he had warned Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London, that if the Daladier government “ratted” on Poland, he, Winston Churchill, lifelong friend of France, would wash his hands of the French. When Corbin blamed France’s slowness in mobilizing on technical difficulties—time was needed to get the army into position and evacuate the civilian population—Churchill shouted, “Technical difficulties! I suppose you would call it a technical difficulty for a Pole if a German bomb dropped on his head.”

Edward Spears, a prominent antiappeasement MP, believed Downing Street was within Churchill’s grasp that afternoon. “His name was on many lips, [and] the more the Cabinet vacillated, the more eyes turned to him.” Churchill was less sure about the size and intensity of the “Winston” boomlet. No British politician had been more insightful about the German threat. As long before as 1932, he had warned that “all those bands of sturdy Teutonic youths marching through the streets and roads of Germany with the light of desire in their eyes . . . are not looking for status.” “They are looking for weapons, and, believe me, when they have the weapons, they will then ask for the return of lost territories and colonies.”

At his best, said a friend, Churchill could say the “fine true thing with a force that was like an organ filling a church.” But in 1939 what most people remembered about Churchill was how often he had played the organ off-key. The egotism, the waywardness, the ambition, the publicity-seeking, the bellicosity: all were legendary. “Mr. Churchill constantly prefers the large, simple conclusions of the battlefield,” noted a reviewer of Churchill’s biography of his ancestor the duke of Marlborough. There were also the disloyalties: jumping from one political party to another, then back again.