In Britain streets were named after Chamberlain. Dinners were held in his honor; crowds followed him to Buckingham Palace, where he appeared on the balcony with the king, and on fishing holidays in the Highlands crowds followed him through Scottish railway stations. Babies were named after him, there were Chamberlain dolls, and Chamberlain bouquets with the inscription “We Are Proud of You.” In Brussels a medal was struck in his honor; from Holland came tulips by the thousands; and from the people of New York and the people of South Africa, grateful thanks for the prime minister’s work on behalf of peace.

“All this will be over in early October,” Chamberlain told Halifax not long after his return from Munich. He was right about the fleeting nature of fame, wrong about how quickly it could flee.

A new Gallup poll taken less than a month after Munich indicated that public support for an antiappeasement government had risen sharply. Another new poll found that 71 percent of the respondents favored keeping the German colonies awarded to Britain at Versailles, even at the risk of war. The sudden stiffening of public resolve owed less to an upsurge in patriotism than to post-Munich disillusionment. Chamberlain had gotten a piece of paper at Munich, and Hitler had gotten the Sudetenland. Emotionally exhausted by two and a half years of lurching from crisis to crisis, people began to rethink their position on war. The pacifism of the interwar years had been driven by the conviction that European civilization had come very close to self-immolation on the battlefields of the Great War. All the peace ballots, debates, and pacifist marches of the thirties were energized by the belief that such a thing must never be allowed to happen again. Munich became the midwife to a new perception among the French and British elites: Terrible as war was, it might be the only way to prevent Hitler and his regime from plunging Europe into a “new dark age.” Munich also gave birth to a new perception among ordinary people, but it was more prosaic. “Living with Hitler,” said one man, “was like living in a neighborhood with a wild animal on the loose.”

In March 1939, when Germany occupied the non-German parts of Czechoslovakia, public opinion hardened further. Lingering guilt about the Treaty of Versailles had restrained Britain’s reaction to Hitler’s earlier occupations. Austria, the Rhineland, and the Sudetenland were historic German lands. In Hitler’s place, Bismarck—or almost any German statesman—would have made it his goal to reconstitute the historic Germany dismembered at Versailles. There was no explanation for the occupation of the ethnic Czech rump except pure, naked aggression. In late March, when the Chamberlain government extended a guarantee to Poland, there was broad public support for the decision.

In late August, after Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, and a German attack on Poland became all but certain, the News Chronicle, one of the big London dailies, decided to test the strength of Never Again. The poll the paper commissioned found that only 11 percent of the British public still remained resolutely pacifist—that is, willing to embrace peace even on German terms. Yet anyone with a feel for public opinion knew the requiems for Never Again were premature. There remained a significant, if hard to quantify, substratum of antiwar feeling in Britain. “It was a vague body almost nebulous . . . and fortunately [had] no leader,” recalled Alfred Duff Cooper, who was on the opposite side of the war debate, having resigned from the Chamberlain cabinet to protest the prime minister’s appeasement. The substratum, said Duff Cooper, “was composed of disparate entities. The left wing of the Labour Party . . . whose detestation of war was so intense that they doubted anything was worth fighting for, . . . the right wing of Conservatism, . . . [whose members] believed that Communism was the greater danger and felt that Hitler had rendered his country a service by suppressing the Communists and might render Europe one by protecting it from the red peril.

“There existed also an attitude even less definite and harder to define, originating probably in the fact that the public mind was ill prepared for war. People had been told recently by ministers, and some sections of the press never ceased to tell them, that there was no longer any danger of war, so that when it [became imminent] they could hardly believe it . . . and clung obstinately to the hope that the whole thing could somehow be patched up.”

Duff Cooper’s list omits one other important center of antiwar feeling: the small but influential section of the British establishment who had grave reservations about risking the British economy and empire in a second conflict with Germany. Members of the group included former prime minister David Lloyd George and Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, and several peers of the realm, among them Lord Londonderry and the Duke of Westminster.