Chamberlain’s rejection of Hitler’s peace offer on October 12 may also have had an effect on German planning. Five days later, on October 17, Hitler told the army’s commander in chief, General von Brauchitsch, and his chief of staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, that “the British will only be ready to talk after a beating. We must get at them as quickly as possible. No use holding back.” A week later the offensive had a name, Case Yellow, and a starting date, November 12, but still not much support from senior German commanders.

In early November, General Halder compressed the army’s objections to Case Yellow into three points. One, “At the moment, we cannot launch an offensive with a distant object.” Two, “None of the higher headquarters think that the offensive . . . has any prospect of success.” And three, “On the whole, the assessment of the enemy is the same as that of the Army High Command.” (The Allies were also aware of the German Army’s shortcomings.)

On November 5, General von Brauchitsch presented Hitler with a memo on Case Yellow that drew heavily on Halder’s conclusions. As head of the army, von Brauchitsch was the logical choice to confront Hitler, but he was perhaps not the best choice. Blandly handsome and apolitical, he had demonstrated great physical courage at Verdun, but physical courage is not the same as moral courage, and Halder had reservations about his superior on that score. The meeting began well enough. Hitler was almost playfully ironic when von Brauchitsch complained about the logistical problems created by the autumn rains: he reminded the general that “it rains on the enemy, too.” But an ominous silence greeted von Brauchitsch’s request that the Army Supreme Command be allowed to run the war without interference, and when von Brauchitsch criticized the army’s performance in Poland, Hitler erupted: The army had always opposed him. The army was cowardly. One day he would crush the army! Then, abruptly, the outburst ended and Hitler asked, “What are you planning?” in a voice that carried the insinuation of holding cells, midnight interrogations, and rubber truncheons. An hour later, when he met Halder outside the old Chancellery building, von Brauchitsch was chalk white. The two men talked for a while; then von Brauchitsch told Halder about Hitler’s question “What are you planning?” That is all that is known about their conversation, but both men must have wondered what Hitler knew or suspected about their ties to the German opposition.

Contacts between the German opposition and the British government dated back to at least 1938. On the eve of the Munich crisis, word reached London that Colonel Hans Oster, a member of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, was organizing a coup against Hitler; but, reluctant to lose a last chance to preserve peace, Chamberlain ignored the reports and flew to Germany. When he returned, promising “peace in our time,” the Oster coup collapsed. In the autumn of 1939, London was more welcoming when news of a new opposition coup arrived. Oster and Colonel Helmut Groscurth, another Abwehr officer, had been in contact with Halder and von Brauchitsch, and both men had expressed an interest in implementing “fundamental changes” in the German government. On October 31, three weeks after Hitler’s peace offer, Chamberlain was so confident a coup was imminent, he told a colleague the Wehrmacht was about to “take the leading part in the formation of a new government” that would return Germany “to peaceful, friendly, tranquil relations with the world.” If it sounded too good to be true, it was.

Whatever remaining faith London had in the German opposition was destroyed by the Venlo incident. A few weeks after von Brauchitsch’s talk with Hitler, Gestapo agents masquerading as opposition members kidnapped two British agents in the Dutch town of Venlo and dragged them across the border to Germany. Shortly thereafter, London received a note from the kidnappers: “Negotiations for any length of time with conceited and silly people are tedious. You will understand therefore that we are giving them up. You are hereby bidden a hearty farewell by your affectionate German opposition, [signed] the Gestapo.”

On November 17, General Winter finally achieved what the German High Command could not. Heavy snows postponed Case Yellow from the seventeenth to the twentieth, then to December 3, December 11, December 17, and December 27. As a precaution, the offensive was postponed yet again, after the Belgians retrieved a signed copy of the plan from Major Hoenmanns’s crashed plane. Case Yellow would not become a reality until May 10, but during the late winter and early spring of 1940 rumors about a German offensive in the West would undermine the last serious attempt to reach a negotiated peace and make a war in distant Finland look ever more attractive to the British and French governments.

Throughout December and into January 1940, the Finns continued to more than hold their own in a war that ranged northward into the Arctic, southward into the Gulf of Finland, and eastward across the high forest of the Karelian Isthmus. But except for the dramatic light and the snow-covered high forests, the war possessed none of the “Nordic charm” that the British, French, and American supporters of Finland imagined. At Suomussalmi, at Ousul, and in a hundred places in between, the pattern of battle was always the same: wave after wave of half-trained Soviet troops attacked into volleys of machine-gun fire to little or no profit except for driving the occasional Finnish machine gunner mad from all the killing. Visiting the battlefield at Suomussalmi before the snows had an opportunity to tidy it up, James Aldridge, an American war correspondent, was shocked. “It was the most horrible sight I’ve ever seen.