Munich with a Difference

Members of Parliament had never known so much uncertainty among their constituents. But in Britain there was much less excitement over the Churchill-Stalin exchanges than in the U.S.

Said a housewife: "Churchill saw the red light years before the 1939-45 war and he sees the red light now. If we had listened to him in the early '30s, there would have been no war."

Said a recently demobilized R.A.F. man: "Churchill has given Stalin the perfect opportunity for saying that the rest of the world is against Russia."

Said a minor diplomat, more expressive of the general mood: "I'm not scared, I'm depressed, damned depressed. You see this is all so much like 1938 and Munich, with one difference. Now we know what Munich meant."

But the diplomat thought it had still to be shown that Russia was the same kind of implacable enemy as Hitler. Official Britain thought the same; at week's end it still stood on the conviction that Russia would halt short of anything that would bring war.

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