Death of a Peacemaker

In the old Norman Church of St. Michael's, at Oldham, in Hampshire. England, a congregation of 14 countryfolk prayed last Sunday evening for the soul of Arthur Neville Chamberlain. The village vicar, the Rev. H. R. P. Tringham, took as the text of his sermon, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Said the vicar in his sermon: "No one labored more hard, or so spared himself rest, to obtain for you and me and for all fellow men the blessings of peace. Although it seemed a failure, it was a grand failure."

Even to some of Neville Chamberlain's neighbors, this seemed too charitable a judgment of the man who had just died beneath the camouflaged roof of a cottage near the church. For the grandeur of Neville Chamberlain's failure might be the grandeur of an Empire's fall. And its cause was not grandeur, or even breadth, of vision; its cause was narrowness of mind.

Nature had done nothing dramatic for Mr. Chamberlain. He was tall and stringy, with the distinction of being the only British statesman who could sing Negro spirituals (learned as a young man when he was trying to raise sisal in the Bahamas), and the biggest feet in the Cabinet. He also had gout and bunions. Clement Attlee once said that Chamberlain's smile reminded him of the silver handles of a coffin. A kindlier woman said his eyes were "cold and smiling, like a Scandinavian river."

Within his range he thought clearly and energetically, but his ideas were the liberal ideas of the late 19th Century. His father, "Old Joe" Chamberlain, had represented the passing of rule from the aristocracy to the mercantile class. When Neville Chamberlain entered politics at the age of 42 his mind was already set in mercantile ways--the ways of negotiation, compromise and trade.

Groomed for business, he went into politics by way of the Birmingham City Council. That was in 1911, the year he married Annie Vere Cole, and during his long climb to the top she encouraged, guided and warned him. She remembered names he forgot, supplied the human touch that was lacking in his personality. Although he was eclipsed for years by his more colorful half-brother Austen, just before Sir Austen's death he rose rapidly. When he succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937, the London Star characterized him as "practical as a plumber, precise as a timetable."

But in the stern test of events the plumbing proved out of order, the timetable out of date. The love of Empire which had caused Father Joe to break with Gladstone over Home Rule for Ireland was the driving force of Neville Chamberlain's life. It was a perverse and shortsighted love. It was said that he would sacrifice, not only Ethiopia, Spain and Czecho-Slovakia, but the half of the world that was not Britain's, to save the British Empire. Alert to the danger of war, he made it his policy to avert war at all costs --even, as it turned out, at the cost of making it inevitable. His failure at Munich was a lugubrious failure to realize that Hitler was not an English gentleman. As Alfred Duff Cooper later said, "Chamberlain had never met anybody in Birmingham who in the least resembled Adolf Hitler."

His failure after Munich was less spectacular, but more costly. Not only was war hateful to him, but all military and naval matters were distasteful. When Hitler broke his word of honor as a gentleman and occupied the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, Chamberlain determined that Britain must rearm. But he believed that rearmament would be used for negotiation, not for war. And so the rearmament of Britain was mostly on paper, and Hitler also knew that.

Chamberlain was too stubborn to quit as Prime Minister until he was forced to quit, too stubborn to quit the Government then. His last months were bitter. The cancer that gnawed at his vitals was a part of his personal feud with Hitler, and like most people who have that disease he clung to life while hating it. When it became clear that his operation had not saved his life for long, he resigned from the Cabinet at last.

When they moved him from London to his aunt's house in Hampshire, he knew he was dying, but still he ordered the secret kept. He was too proud to ask for sympathy. He lay in a room whose windows looked out on a grove of larch trees, with placid fields beyond. His wife stayed with him. Occasionally his thin lips curled back from his long, uneven teeth in a grimace of pain. Once a German airman flew over Oldharn Village and dropped a rack of bombs. One fell within 40 yards of where Chamberlain lay and the man who had said "I think it is peace in our time" shuddered. When the end was near they gave him drugs to dull the pain. Later he sank into a coma. After a while he died.

One of his friends had said of him: "Neville is a man to die with, but not for." Chamberlain had died for his country, in his own queer, lonely way, while his country still fought for its life. It was too soon to know whether the life and death of Neville Chamberlain was the tragedy of a man and a class, or of a nation, an empire and a race.

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