High Tide and After

International summitry came of age at the four-power conference convened at Munich on 29–30 September 1938. A great deal of publicity surrounded the event, agreement was reached after a minimum of bargaining, and all the principals came away satisfied. Mussolini played the part of broker presenting a plan the Germans had told him to propose, and Russian absence was conveniently forgotten about. With Czech delegates deposited in an ante-room waiting to be told their country’s future, there was little to impede the smooth transaction of business. As host Hitler indulged his habit of working long into the night, so the conference began late, broke up for dinner, and was kept going into the small hours of 30 September. The representatives of what Masaryk only days before had called the ‘great western democracies’ assented to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia because, they could say, agreement had been reached through negotiation. Daladier received the required get-out on France’s treaty obligations, while Chamberlain, seen to be ‘yawn[ing] unrestrainedly throughout’ was presented with sufficient modification of the Godesberg terms to enable him to go back to London maintaining that, in effect, the Anglo-French plan agreed to after Berchtesgaden was once more operative.1