“We fear that . . . if the Governments of [neutral] Sweden and Norway get the idea that some peace suggestions are likely to be set afoot, they will refuse to grant [the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force] the passage we want in order to save Finland.” This was a half-truth at best. To London, the most attractive aspect of saving Finland was that British troops would pass the Swedish iron ore fields on their way north.

Reaction to the Welles mission in Berlin and Paris was also unenthusiastic, but Rome, Rome was different.

Two weeks after the New York Times announcement, Welles was sitting in Mussolini’s office on the Piazza Venezia. For a man who embodied grandiosity in its most florid form, the Duce’s office was surprisingly restrained. High-ceilinged and long, the room sought its effects in the play of light on empty space and in clean, unadorned lines. There were no furnishings except Mussolini’s desk, which sat at the far end of the office and the three chairs in front of it, and no light except for the natural light flooding through the windows, and that from a single lamp on the Duce’s desk. The aged figure who rose to greet Welles was also a surprise. In person, Mussolini looked “fifteen years older than his actual age of 58 . . . moved with an elephantine motion . . . and was very heavy for his height.” For most of the nearly two-hour interview, the Duce sat sphinx-like behind the desk, the small lamp illuminating the folds of skin on his fleshy face, his eyes shut except when a question particularly interested him. When Welles asked if he thought a negotiated peace settlement was still possible, the eyes popped open.

“Yes!” Mussolini replied, “emphatically.” None of “the people now at war desired to fight. The situation . . . in that regard [is] utterly different from that which existed in 1914”; but if a “real war breaks out, with its attendant slaughters and devastations, there will be no possibility, for a long time to come, of any peace negotiation.” Welles left the meeting feeling that one part of Mussolini was genuinely interested in brokering a peace settlement, but that part was at war with the Roman emperor, who was fond of proclaiming, “I was born never to leave the Italians in peace.” Welles had heard the rumors about a German offensive in the West, and believed its outcome would determine which of the two Mussolinis prevailed. If “Germany obtains some rapid apparent victory, such as the occupation of Holland and Belgium,” Welles cabled Washington, “I fear very much that Mussolini would then bring Italy in on the German side.”

Four days later Welles stood in a cold Berlin wind, examining two monumental black nudes in the Court of Honor, the entrance to Hitler’s Chancellery. The statues were the sole expression of humanity in the court, and they failed to express it convincingly enough to relieve the acute sense of oppression that Welles felt standing in a rectangle of “high blank walls” open only to the sky. It was March 2, and Welles was in Berlin to confer with Hitler, who proved even more unlike his public image than did Mussolini.

Charlie Chaplin’s comic Hitler in The Great Dictator had made such a deep impression on the Western public, it was almost impossible for a non-German to imagine the Führer doing anything except goose-stepping, tugging at his mustache, or throwing a temper tantrum. The Hitler who greeted Welles under the mural of the cardinal virtues bore little resemblance to the Chaplin creation. In person, Hitler was taller and more physically prepossessing than he appeared in newsreels; he also spoke a surprisingly “beautiful German” in a “low, well modulated voice” and was dignified in manner and temperate in his observations. Indeed, European peace had no better friend than Adolf Hitler until Welles asked about the prospect of negotiating an end to the war. “I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France is itself destroyed,” Hitler replied. “There is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can be itself destroyed, except through a German victory. I believe that German might is such as to ensure the triumph of Germany, but if not, we will all go down together.” How much of this Hitler really believed, Welles was unsure, but he was sure that the average German believed it. The Treaty of Versailles and a decade of Nazi propaganda had convinced the German people that the Western powers were committed not just to Germany’s defeat but also to its annihilation. The outburst over, Hitler assumed the statesman’s mantle again, and the meeting concluded on a cordial note. “I appreciate your sincerity and that of your government,” he told Welles. As Welles was boarding the Paris train a few hours later, Hitler was issuing a secret directive for Fall Weserubung: the occupation of Norway and Denmark.

“There is only one way to deal with a mad dog,” Georges Clemenceau, France’s Great War leader, once observed. “Either kill him or chain him with a steel chain that cannot be broken.” During his visit to Paris, Welles heard several versions of the Clemenceau doctrine from his successors. Albert Lebrun, the French president, said that after three German wars in seventy years, “it was a vital need of France to ensure herself that at least one generation of Frenchmen can be born to live a normal span of life.” Jules Jenneney, president of the French Senate, put that thought more fiercely: Germany, he said, had to be “taught such a lesson as to make it impossible for the German people ever again to bring about a European conflagration.” The only major French politician who spoke of a negotiated settlement was Édouard Daladier, the premier, who told Welles he believed an agreement with Germany was still possible, but, just before leaving Paris, Welles heard that France was assembling a fleet at Brest to carry the fifty-thousand-man Allied Expeditionary Force to Finland. Had Welles spoken to the former foreign minister Georges Bonnet, or to Pierre Laval, a prominent French senator, he would have left Paris with a different impression of French resolve.

In London, Chamberlain and Lord Halifax spoke of punishing Germany for its aggression, but in the company of intimates, the foreign secretary took a slightly different view. One day, when his undersecretary, Rab Butler, said the war was a mistake, Halifax thought for a moment and then replied, “I agree.” However, below Chamberlain, Halifax, and a few other cabinet ministers, everyone else Welles met in London was in full war paint.