The events of The Teeth of Beasts take place against the encroaching international politics of the day. The book ends as tensions in the wider world are beginning to inflict sinister, disruptive changes not just on the financial arrangements of distant cousins, but on our protagonists’ own sense of themselves. And if you've been awake over this blood-stained last summer, that won't sound as incomprehensible as if might done before.
How should Sam, a proud Jewish WWI ex-serviceman, view Hitler? Should he clamour for war? Shrink from the prospect of others sacrificing for the sake of ‘his people’, as Mosley's Fascists said was about to happen? Should he cringe at the thought of even being asked his opinion?
Hulking, foul-tempered, indignant foreign powers, impervious to humanitarian considerations, were pawing and swiping at underpowered and fragile democracies on their borders, just as they do today. Then, as now, our government, and its opponents, interspersed debates on sending Englishmen to die – for the sake of ‘faraway countries, of which we know nothing’ – with mundane Parliamentary business.
Should our leaders then have pleaded base self-interest and looked away from the refugees, from bestial persecutions, and the staged ‘incidents’ at remote border posts? That is what our government did seventy-six years ago today, the only defence being that at the Munich Conference, the British government was as much outfoxed as wrongly principled, in their failure to see the gathering clouds of blackest evil, boiling over above Germany.
The apogee of the moral blindness, for me, was the ensuing Munich Agreement, from whose signing Neville Chamberlain returned to London waving his ‘Peace in our Time’ contract with Adolf Hitler; a document worth less, it soon transpired, than the handkerchief in his pocket. By giving Germany the Sudetenland, in return for a few months of self-delusory mere absence of war – hardly ‘peace’ in the full sense – Chamberlain as good as sold the Czechoslovaks to the Third Reich.
How should Sam, a proud Jewish WWI ex-serviceman, view Hitler? Should he clamour for war? Shrink from the prospect of others sacrificing for the sake of ‘his people’, as Mosley's Fascists said was about to happen? Should he cringe at the thought of even being asked his opinion?
Hulking, foul-tempered, indignant foreign powers, impervious to humanitarian considerations, were pawing and swiping at underpowered and fragile democracies on their borders, just as they do today. Then, as now, our government, and its opponents, interspersed debates on sending Englishmen to die – for the sake of ‘faraway countries, of which we know nothing’ – with mundane Parliamentary business.
Should our leaders then have pleaded base self-interest and looked away from the refugees, from bestial persecutions, and the staged ‘incidents’ at remote border posts? That is what our government did seventy-six years ago today, the only defence being that at the Munich Conference, the British government was as much outfoxed as wrongly principled, in their failure to see the gathering clouds of blackest evil, boiling over above Germany.
The apogee of the moral blindness, for me, was the ensuing Munich Agreement, from whose signing Neville Chamberlain returned to London waving his ‘Peace in our Time’ contract with Adolf Hitler; a document worth less, it soon transpired, than the handkerchief in his pocket. By giving Germany the Sudetenland, in return for a few months of self-delusory mere absence of war – hardly ‘peace’ in the full sense – Chamberlain as good as sold the Czechoslovaks to the Third Reich.
You might want to read about Munich – it will not be trumpeted about in England today. That disgraceful betrayal, by us (and by a very cowardly French government), of the Czechoslovaks, our trussing them up for the delectation of the slathering Nazi beasts, is worth remembering for its own sake, and for our shame. But it also arguably represents the culmination of the moral descent, the ‘morbid age’ (I don't remember if Richard Overy invented the phrase), whose atmosphere I have tried to inject, like a slowly spreading poison, into the background of The Teeth of Beasts.