'Ay, Chamberlain; but not gone,' added Elizabeth Tiplady, who had left school more recently than the rest of us.
'So much for Hitler's "last territorial demand in Europe", over the Sudeten Germans,' I said.
'Do you realize the significance of what's just happened?' Archie demanded of the table in general. 'By now, we're sickeningly used to Hitler invading neighbouring countries. But for the first time he's enlarged the Reich not simply to include expatriate Germans like the Austrians or Sudetens. He's gobbled up a foreign nation, the Czechs. Who knows who's next?'
'The Poles,' David poured himself more claret-a '34, claimed by Archie to be the best out of ten terrible years.
'Us?' suggested Elizabeth.
'What's Chamberlain going to do?' I asked, Archie being a fount of political information more immediate if not always more accurate than the newspapers.
'Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He's done all he can do already. Did you read what he said in the House this afternoon? That the collapse of Czecho-Slovakia was inevitable. That the Slovakia half of it simply declared itself independent, so we're no longer bound to guarantee its frontiers under the Munich agreement. Fancy falling back on legal niceties with the Gestapo already in Prague! Chamberlain whines about a breach of the Munich spirit, as though Hitler had omitted to send him a Christmas card. The whole business is utterly disgraceful. Poor, old, ill President Hбcha has been horribly let down, just as we let down President Beneљ. No wonder the Tory party's looking sick. If I was a Conservative MP today, I'd vomit over the benches.'
'What's this we're supposed to be eating?' asked David. 'Stewed pheasant?'
'It couldn't possibly be. Pheasant shooting ends on February the first,' said Archie severely. For all his socialism, he had the aristocrat's disdain for ignorance of country matters.
'It's chicken, _I think.'_ Elizabeth struggled to cut it.
'I don't know the first thing about food,' remarked Archie airily. 'It's a dish which Watson seems to like cooking. I suppose because he finds it one of the easiest.'
'Do you think Watson appreciates that instead of not having to call you "Sir", he now doesn't have to call you "My Lord"?' I enquired.
'Oh, this title!' Archie complained. 'Do you realize, politically it's like those concrete overcoats in which gangsters drop their rivals into New York harbour. One simply disappeared without a gurgle. Of course, none of us expected my father to die so suddenly last Christmas. I so much wanted to make some sort of impact on the Commons before being shoved into the Madame Tussaud's of the Lords. When I think of the constituencies I've nursed!' He ended pathetically.
Archie had always seemed to be nursing a constituency since going down from Cambridge, though the foundlings were never grateful enough to elect him to Parliament. But he did good among them, helping the inadequate and the inarticulate before they were lavished with the bounty of the Welfare State.
'Can't you shed your title the way people do with their awful christian names?' asked Elizabeth. 'Or sell it to the Americans like all the nicest country houses?'
'Archie, you really ought to sack Watson,' David advised. 'He'll give you a recurrence of your duodenal ulcer.'
'I don't eat at home very much. I'm far too busy.' Archie reached towards the cluster of wine bottles. 'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' he repeated. frankly admit, that for a while I simply couldn't take Hitler seriously. I'll admit that I thought him perfectly justified reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, for instance. But wasn't I one of many, who asked why he shouldn't be allowed to move his soldiers about his own back yard? And after all, he was doing a lot for the unemployed, which nobody was here.'
'Do you ever hear from your friends there, Jim?' David asked.
I shook my head. I stopped writing to Gerda when I married Rosie. 'I shouldn't care to provoke a letter returned _Empfдnger unbekannt.'_
'"Addressee Unknown" has terrifying implications,' Archie commented sombrely. He went on, 'It was Spain which changed my mind about Hitler.'
'Darling, it was such a pity that you never got there,' Elizabeth told him sympathetically.
'I couldn't help developing an ulcer.'
'It must have been terribly frustrating, it all going on and you having to lie on your back in Swanage instead.'
'I almost enlisted,' he told her irritably. He had recounted the story that evening in the expectation-which he should have known to be perfectly ridiculous, it being Elizabeth-of impressing my young lady. 'I'd got as far as Paris. That's why Spain decided me more than Abyssinia. Because it was possible to get involved onself. After all, two thousand of us in Britain joined the International Brigade. And five hundred of us won't come back. Thank God the whole thing seems almost over.'
'According to George Orwell, it was all a tremendous fiasco, even for a war,' I observed.
'"I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain",' he quoted W H Auden, raising his glass. 'Then of course there's the German Jews.'
'Our Freud which art in Hampstead,' said David.
We were interrupted by Watson in his tail coat. He had become fatter and even ruder, and I thought in many respects resembled Mussolini. 'All right, is it?'
'Divine,' Elizabeth said.
'You haven't cleared away the cocktail things,' Archie told him sternly.
'I can't do everything, can I?'
'I don't think any of us want any more.' Archie pushed away the half-eaten dish. 'You may serve the pudding.'
'There ain't none. I've some fruit.'
'Open a couple of bottles of Cliquot,' Archie commanded. He added as Watson withdrew, 'Do you know what I heard yesterday? When Halifax went to Berchtesgaden a couple of months ago, he was greeted at the front door by Hitler in that usual ridiculous get-up of brown jacket and dress trousers. Our lordly cabinet minister mistook him for the footman. He was within an inch of handing over his hat and stick. Think how the course of history might have been changed!'
'Hitler would have sent his Air Force to blow us up between the soup and fish, I expect,' said Elizabeth.
'London may not be so beautiful as Paris or Prague,' said Archie, who had travelled to both. 'But like any Frenchman or any Czech I don't want wakening at dawn to the crash of bombs. That's why I was incredibly relieved by Munich.'
'Like everyone else,' I said. The iron-crossed wings of Hermann Gцring's Luftwaffe overshadowed Europe. No one had experienced mass aerial bombardment, but after Spain everyone could imagine it. The German Air Force was the atomic bomb of the 1930s.
'It's Wednesday!' Elizabeth jumped from the table to switch on the radiogram beside the fireplace. 'I mustn't miss Arthur Askey.'
'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' Archie declared once again. 'I now commit myself to standing up to Hitler, whatever the cost. With Russia, all the better-if Europe hadn't been so neurotically afraid of Communism, Hitler would never have got where he has. If not, alone with France.'
'And America?' I suggested.
'America is only interested in the World Fair on Flushing Meadow,' Archie said irritably.
'What about this champagne, boy?' asked David.
'I expect Watson's forgotten.' Archie reached his long arm for the bell. 'The question remains, what exactly can one do.'_
'Get your blood group registered,' suggested David practically. 'They're going to need the stuff by the gallon.'
'With Spain, it was easy. One simply volunteered.' Archie often seemed genuinely to believe that he had fought on the hard-baked, blood-soaked ridges of Catalonia.
'Volunteer as an air raid warden.' I told him. 'Or a fireman. I saw in today's paper that the government wants a hundred thousand of them.'
'I'd volunteer for the Army, but what's the point when the Government are moving towards the utterly oppressive step of conscription in peacetime? Which I and every other socialist should have imagined unthinkable in this country.'