“I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when Britain and all that Britain stands for and human civilization is in peril.” As Greenwood finished to thunderous applause, Channon sat on the Tory benches, disconsolate at the House’s reaction: “All the old Munich rage all over again. . . . All those who want to die abuse Caesar.” The chief Conservative whip, the imposing David Margesson, fearing a backbench revolt against Chamberlain, signaled the Speaker to gavel the session to a close.

As the crowd thinned out, Channon pushed his way through the departing MPs to the chief whip. Margesson was the kind of Englishman Channon would like to have been. He had an admirable war record, an impeccable bloodline, implacable self-assurance, and he possessed the kind of elegant masculine physical glamour now only seen in movies of the 1930s. Can’t anything be done to help the prime minister? Channon asked. Margesson shrugged. “It must be war, Chip, old boy; there is no other way out.” Later in the evening, the chief whip gave the prime minister the same advice, though in rougher language.

The civil defense authorities had warned that, should war come, it would begin with a German air strike on London. On the night of September 2, Londoners received a foretaste of what that would be like. The day had been hot and sultry, and, as darkness descended, the dense, humid air congealed into huge black pillars of cloud that billowed upward into the evening sky. At about nine, lightning crackled over the Thames. For a moment, Parliament flashed a brilliant gold, then vanished back into darkness; the wind picked up, the barrage balloons tossed and turned and strained at their cables, and then great torrents of rain began to pelt down on southeastern England, flooding byways, clogging traffic, and sending hundreds of tons of garbage flooding through the blacked-out streets of the imperial capital.

It rained on the Royal Navy ships leaving port to take up blockade positions along the German coast; on the army lorries slipping through the liquid darkness toward embarkation points; on the antiaircraft crews shivering under tarps in Hyde Park; on “the Kennel Farm and Aviary,” which offered “evacuation facilities for pets”; and on the ticket offices of P&O (Pacific & Orient shipping line), where uncertain patriots could book a “cruise 1,000 miles up the Amazon” for only £75. It rained on the darkened streets where no child’s voice had been heard for days; on the empty museums; on the memorials to the “glorious dead”; and on the surplus women, deep into their forties and dreaming of Leslie Howard now.

In Downing Street, where an emergency late-evening cabinet was in session, a shaken Chamberlain announced that “the strength of feeling in the House of Commons” had convinced him that an immediate display of resolve was needed to steady the country. Therefore, Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, had been instructed to present an ultimatum to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, the next day at 9:00 a.m.; the ultimatum would expire at 11:00 a.m. If Bonnet “could not accept our time for delivery and expiry, the French Ambassador [can deliver the French ultimatum] at a later hour.”

At 11:15 a.m. the following day, the prime minister addressed the nation. “I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street,” he said. “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless they were prepared to withdraw all their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking had been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” No one who heard Chamberlain’s broadcast that morning could have had any doubt about the depth of his disappointment. As the prime minister reached the penultimate passage of his speech—“consequently this country is at war with Germany”—sorrow and despair sang through the melancholic old voice. But then he ruined the effect with a concluding sentence that bubbled over with self-pity and solipsism: “You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that my entire long struggle to win the peace has failed.”

At 11:27 air raid sirens wailed, and Londoners huddled together in cellars, tube stations, and shelters, awaiting the arrival of the bomber stream and the thud of the antiaircraft guns. A little after noon, the “all clear” sounded, and thousands of dazed men and women climbed back into the brilliant September sunlight, blessing their good fortune. An off-course plane had triggered the alert.

At 5:00 p.m. the French ultimatum went into effect.

“Thus we tumbled into Armageddon without heart, without songs, without an ally except France (and she lukewarm), without aircraft, without tanks, without guns, without rifles, without even a reserve of raw commodities and feeding stuffs,” wrote Bob Boothby. A week later, when Italy and Japan announced their neutrality, the gravest threat to British security, a world war, receded. For now only Germany would have to be confronted, and, while it would be poked and prodded, it would not be poked and prodded hard enough to incite the holocaust of total war for a second time. Under Chamberlain, Britain would fight a limited war for limited ends and with limited means.

While the pace of rearmament would be quickened, for the time being the prime minister planned to emphasize two other components of his war plan. The first was propaganda. During the autumn of 1939, thousands of copies of dozens of different propaganda pamphlets were dropped on Germany, including Hitler and the Working Man, the best, though not the only, example of why the academics and literary figures the Ministry of Information employed to write propaganda were too genteel for the job. Hitler and the Working Man began by describing national socialism as “an honorable experiment” and noted that its early leaders had had many “fine ideals.” The second component of the Chamberlain war plan was economic blockade. Chamberlain believed—and it was a belief shared by the British intelligence services and many senior civil servants—that the huge cost of rearmament had overstretched the German economy, leaving Hitler incapable of fighting anything but the kind of short, sharp war he was fighting in Poland.