The next morning, when church bells rang in the little villages along the upper Rhine, German troops in field gray and French troops in horizon blue faced each other across the old Franco-German border for the first time since 1870.

A few days after the Rhineland coup Robert Boothby, a member of the December Club, a group of antiappeasement MPs, warned the House of Commons that if allowed to stand, the coup, which violated both the Pact of Locarno and the Treaty of Versailles, would undermine the postwar system of collective security in a way that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put back together again. Churchill issued a similar warning, but he was almost the only politician of national stature to do so, and his warning, like Boothby’s, was largely ignored. Paul Emery Evans, another member of the December Club, blamed Baldwin for the apathetic public reaction to the growing German threat. “The country was never told the truth, and those who endeavored to explain what was going in the world . . . were written off . . . as a small body of alarmists.” Baldwin was guilty as charged, but if he committed a crime, it was telling an antiwar public what they wanted to hear. In the late 1930s, the antiappeasement movement would grow in strength, attracting other national figures besides Churchill, including Alfred Duff Cooper and Leo Amery, two former first lords of the Admiralty, as well as promising young politicians such as Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister. But young or old, most of the men who formed themselves into antiappeasement groups such as the Vigilantes, the December Club, and the Watching Committee, had been shaped by Harrow dawns and Cambridge nights. When they spoke of war, they spoke of it in the heroic language of “Vitaï Lampada,” that ode to public school valor.

The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead

 . . . England is far and honor a name

But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks

Play up, play up and play the game

To the housewife in London and the postman in Leeds, as to Stanley Baldwin and to a large part of the Labour Party, war was not a schoolboy poem, it was the first day of the Somme battle—almost sixty thousand men killed or wounded between sunrise and sunset; it was the soliloquy in Act Five of Henry IV: “What is honor? . . . a word. Who hath it? He that died on Wednesday. Therefore I’ll none of it.” A few weeks after the Rhineland coup Hugh Dalton, a senior Labour politician, spoke not just for his party but for most of Britain when he told Parliament that “public opinion . . . and certainly the Labour Party would not support the taking of military sanctions or even economic sanctions against Germany at this time.” In France, public reaction to the Rhineland coup was more a shrug than a shout. Joked the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaine, “The Germans have invaded—Germany!” In Belgium, also a party to the Pact of Locarno, the response was close to naked fear. Except for a small sliver of the country around Ypres, Belgium had spent most of the Great War under German occupation. The Belgian government immediately revoked the alliance with France and declared that, henceforth, Belgium would adopt Swiss-style neutrality. Eventually, the Rhineland dispute found its way to the council of the League of Nations, which declared Germany in violation of both the Pact of Locarno and the Treaty of Versailles; but since the council lacked the means to enforce its judgment, the German troops remained on the old 1870 Franco-German border.

In “Omens of 1936,” published in the Fortnightly Review in January of that year, historian Denis Brogan predicted that 1936 would be the year that faith in Never Again began to falter. And events would prove Brogan more right than wrong. In addition to the Rhineland coup, 1936 was the year civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the European press began to report regular sightings of the death ship. Not coincidentally, 1936 was also the year when the diplomatic visit became a staple of the cinema newsreel. Typically, the newsreel would open with a panning shot of dignitaries standing on a railway platform, the politicians in top hats and frocks, the soldiers in gold-braided comic opera uniforms. A whistle is heard, heads turn, and a mighty engine appears, black as the African night, its swept-back nose creating the impression of great speed even as the train crawls into the station at ten miles per hour. Pulling to a halt in front of the platform, the pistons emit a snake-like hiss, and the waiting dignitaries disappear into a vapor of white steam. After the cloud dissipates, a flower girl appears and presents the visiting diplomat with a bouquet; pleasantries are exchanged on the platform; then the diplomat vanishes into the backseat of a big five-liter Horsch limousine with gull wing fenders or into a black Renault sedan with silver chevrons on the grille.

If the newsreel is set in the Balkans, the diplomat is French and he is there to shore up the troubled Little Entente, the alliance France has formed with Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). If the newsreel is set in Spain, the diplomat could be a German—or an Italian, visiting Generalissimo Francisco Franco, leader of rebel Nationalist forces—or a Russian, visiting members of the Republican government in Madrid. If the newsreel is set in Berlin, the diplomat is Japanese, and he is in the German capital to witness the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Japan and Germany. And if the newsreel is set in Rome, the diplomat could be German, or, even more likely, British, in which case he is in Italy to do the bidding of the new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.

The House of Chamberlain, founded by the prime minister’s father, Joe, lord mayor of Birmingham, and long presided over by older half brother Austen, a foreign secretary, had a history of producing able, ambitious, thrusting personalities. And Joe Chamberlain’s youngest son would more than live up to that standard. When his turn to lead the family came, Neville would not only raise the roof, he also would put a new wing on the House of Chamberlain.