Retreat or Rout?

No year in post-War Europe was more replete with hastily arranged conferences, mobilizations and general crises than 1938. The events which culminated in the historic four-power meeting in September at Munich and which resulted in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia so fascinated journalists, diplomatic observers, even radio announcers that from their typewriters has come a steady stream of articles, essays and books on the subject. Most of these were sketchy, designed to cash in quickly on Munich's newsworthiness.

Early last autumn sober, learned Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong of the quarterly Foreign Affairs started in earnest to piece together all the threads of the Czechoslovak crisis for a 15-page article for his magazine. The more Munich was regarded in perspective, however, the larger did it loom as a milestone in history.

To tell the story of the complicated diplomatic maneuvering and to weigh Munich's results impartially, Editor Armstrong needed no less than 93 pages in the January Foreign Affairs. Even then there were still missing links to be supplied, such as a full chronology of events and official texts. Final result of Mr. Armstrong's post-Munich ponderings, published this week, is a full-fledged book entitled When There Is No Peace,* whose 236 pages constitute the first really professional, scholarly analysis of a year filled with Fascist triumphs and democratic defeats.

His conclusions: the "peace for our time," which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed he took home from Munich, was at best only an armistice; notwithstanding post-Munich pretenses, war has been postponed, not really averted, to a moment more unfavorable than ever for the democracies; if French and British diplomatic forces were not completely routed at Munich, they were certainly obliged hastily to retreat and sue for what President Roosevelt later called "peace by fear."

To Editor Armstrong the record demonstrates that the Chamberlain policy of appeasement was inept, vacillating, intriguing, unfrank. Appeaser No. 1 would first blow hot, then cold, would one day pretend that he was standing up to the Nazis, would the next concede an important point to them.

He was constantly subject to pressure by members of his Conservative Party (including Cabinet members) to whom Hitler was a "guardian of capitalism" and to whom any alliance with Soviet Russia was anathema. They professed to be impressed by accounts of German air superiority, stressed the purely defensive value of French fortifications, discounted Soviet military power, the French Army's will to fight. They said nothing about the well-trained Czech Army, Britain's undisputed control of the seas, the unfinished condition of Germany's defenses, German insufficiency in raw materials, German internal discontent, the German Army's revulsion at the thought of war.

No judge of international morality is Mr. Armstrong. He is more interested in expediency than in ethics. "It is not for an American to say that Englishmen or Frenchmen should fight and die for causes which do not seem to them vital," he writes. Chief U. S. interest in the decisions reached at Munich should be the shift in Europe's balance of power, lessening respect for international law, lack of observance of treaties, collapse of the system of collective security. All in all, says Editor Armstrong, Mr. Chamberlain might better have adopted a motto implying reciprocity rather than appeasement.

* Macmillan ($1.75).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.