Austria was not a lost territory, but it was shrunken almost to insignificance by Versailles, and many Germans felt its rightful place was inside a Greater Reich.

In November 1937, Lord Edward Halifax, a member of the Chamberlain cabinet and one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers, met with Hitler. This was Halifax’s second visit to the “new” Germany. After the first one, he returned to London sounding like a botanist who had discovered a bizarrely florid but probably benign new species of plant life during his travels. Halifax “told me he . . . was much amused by the visit,” a friend said. “He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic, perhaps too fantastic to be taken seriously.” In late 1937 Halifax still thought the Hitler regime fantastic, but he was becoming aware of its dangers, and, like millions of his countrymen, he did not want Britain dragged into a war on the far side of Europe over issues that did not affect its security and that, in British eyes, had a measure of legitimacy. During his second visit, Halifax told Hitler that, provided peaceful means were employed, Britain would be prepared to accept “possible alterations in the European order, which might be destined to come about with the passage of time. Amongst these questions were Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.”

Hitler assured Halifax that Germany wished to have good relations with all its neighbors. Four months later, the Wehrmacht marched into Vienna and Austria became a part of the Reich. Two months after the Anschluss—May 1938—rumors began to circulate that ten German divisions had been moved to the Reich border opposite the Sudetenland. “Those d——d Germans have spoiled another weekend for me,” Chamberlain complained to his sister Hilda on May 22. Britain issued a mild warning; Germany denied that it had troops on the Sudetenland border; then, in an inspired piece of diplomacy, it was decided to blame the crisis on the Czechs, the only party to the dispute incapable of starting a world war on its own.

June and July of 1938 passed calmly, but it was not the normal calm of summer. In the Rhineland, construction crews worked double and triple shifts under arc lights to complete the West Wall, a new defensive system that the Allied powers called the Siegfried Line. In Paris Georges Bonnet, the French foreign minister, scrutinized the French-Czechoslovakian treaty for loopholes. In Moscow Stalin, who also had a treaty with the Czechs, watched carefully to see who would emerge victorious from the Sudeten confrontation, Germany or Britain and France. In Washington the Roosevelt administration prepared an appeal for moderation. And in London the Chiefs of Staff issued a new warning: In the event of an Anglo-German war over Czechoslovakia, “it is more than probable that both Italy and Japan would seize the opportunity to further their own ends and that in consequence the problem we have to envisage is not that of a limited European war but of world war.” In July, when Chamberlain spoke at Birmingham’s centenary celebration, the Chiefs’ warning was still on his mind. “The government of which I am at present the head intends to hold on its course, which is set for the appeasement of the world.”

The Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy took note of the speech, though to one Tolleshunt resident, Margery Allingham, Czechoslovakia remained a faraway country with an all but unspellable name until the end of July, when Margery and a group of friends gathered in her yard one afternoon to plan the annual village cricket party. It was a lovely Saturday, the air heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass, and overhead, a few fat cumulus clouds drifting idly eastward toward the sea—just the kind of day that always made Margery feel smug about abandoning a glamorous London publishing career for life in an obscure Essex village whose sole distinction was its possession of one of the two surviving Maypoles in England. The state of the village cricket field dominated most of the afternoon’s discussion, but toward evening one guest brought up the Czech crisis, and Margery, who was thirty-four, found herself thinking back to her childhood in the Great War. She remembered a recurring dream she had had then: “a soldier galloping up on a great grey horse to kiss [a] tearful nurse goodbye . . . then death . . . and not ordinary dying either . . . but death final, empty and away somewhere.” She remembered other things about that time: “the women and old people all in black . . . standing about in the village street reading the enormous casualty lists . . . ; [and] the village boy on a bike with not one telegraph spelling tragedy but sometimes two or even three.” Then an astonishing thought occurred to Margery: war, which had savaged the generation before hers, now seemed about to savage the generation after hers. The thought was so staggering, she found it “hardly to be borne.”

By early September 1938, reminders of 1914 were everywhere. Poland and Hungary, eager to participate in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, were massing troops along the Czech border; in Prague the Czech government proclaimed martial law; in Nuremberg, Hitler pledged unshakable support for those “tortured creatures,” the Sudeten Germans; and in Britain the Royal Navy was put on partial alert. Passing the Cenotaph in Whitehall that Munich summer, Alec Douglas-Home, a Chamberlain aide and future prime minister, noticed that several fresh bouquets had been placed at its base.

“Well, it has been a pretty awful week,” Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida on September 11. Four days later, the prime minister was flying down the Thames on his way to visit Hitler. Approaching Bavaria, the British Airways’ Lockheed Electra swooped under a heavy storm and set down smoothly at the Munich airport.