"Munich"

This is the kind of (pre-)WWII novel I want to read - compact, swift, immersive. The emotional high point was Legat and Hartmann's drive-by to the concentration camp. Robert Harris is way more prolific than I remembered.
(Also, the kind of WWII novel I'm too jaded for is "The Book of Lost Names", no offense to Kristen Harmel.)

• Here he found his path blocked by a silent crowd of twenty watching what looked like a small airship rising slowly behind the Houses of Parliament. It ascended past the spire of Big Ben, an oddly beautiful sight—majestic, surreal. In the distance he could make out half a dozen others in the sky south of the Thames—tiny silver torpedoes, some already thousands of feet high. The man beside him murmured, “I suppose you could say the balloon’s gone up.” Legat glanced at him. He remembered his father using exactly the same expression when he was home on leave during the Great War. He had to go back to France because the balloon had gone up. To Hugh’s six-year-old ears it had sounded as if he was going off to a party. It was the last time he had seen him.
• They were men in their fifties or sixties, the “Big Three,” in the prime of their power—bulked by their dignity beyond their physical size. Legat stood aside to let them pass—“like a trio of pall-bearers in search of their coffin”
• “ ‘It is our opinion that no pressure that Great Britain and France can bring to bear, either by sea, on land, or in the air, could prevent Germany from overrunning Bohemia and from inflicting a decisive defeat on Czechoslovakia. The restoration of Czechoslovakia’s lost integrity could only be achieved by the defeat of Germany and as the outcome of a prolonged struggle, which from the outset must assume the character of an unlimited war.’ ”
• “I’m afraid there is a technical problem with the guns on the Hurricanes, Prime Minister—they freeze above fifteen thousand feet.” “What’s that you’re saying?” Chamberlain leaned forward as if he had not heard correctly. “We’re working on a solution, but it may take some time.” “No, what you are actually saying, Air Marshal, is that we have spent one and a half thousand million pounds on rearmament, the bulk of it on the air, and when it comes to it our warplanes don’t work.” “Our planning has always been predicated on there being no conflict with Germany before 1939 at the earliest.”
• Legat continued writing calmly, smoothing the awkward facts into bureaucratic prose—PM expressed concern at adequacy of home air defence—
• At first he had adopted the traditional, formal, neutral tone of a professional diplomat. But many of these early efforts had been rejected as insufficiently National Socialist; some had even been returned to him by SS-Sturmbannführer Sauer of Ribbentrop’s staff, with a thick black line scrawled through them. He had been forced to recognise that if his career was to prosper a certain adjustment of style would be necessary. Gradually therefore he had trained himself to mimic the Minister’s bombastic manner and radical world view, and it was in this spirit that he set to work answering the owner of the Daily Mail, his pen scraping and stabbing at the paper as he worked himself into a state of faux-outrage.
• This was the information upon which government policy would be decided: one might almost say nothing else much mattered in comparison. Diplomacy, morality, law, obligation—what did these weigh in the scales against military strength? An RAF squadron, if he remembered correctly, consisted of twenty planes. So at high altitude there were only twenty modern fighters with working guns to defend the entire country.
• As for the speech itself, he did not care for it. There was too much of the first person singular for his taste: I was flying backwards and forwards across Europe…I have done all that one man can do…I shall not give up the hope of a peaceful solution…I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul…In his ostentatiously modest way, he thought, Chamberlain was as egocentric as Hitler: he always conflated the national interest with himself.
• The door closed. Legat stared at the painted white panels. Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken. Few understood that rule better than the Principal Private Secretary. Legat felt obscurely humiliated.
• Neville Chamberlain, speaking from Number Ten Downing Street. His speech will be heard all over the Empire, throughout the continent of America, and in a large number of foreign countries.
• the trick, when I’m speaking on the wireless, is to try to imagine I’m talking just to one person, sitting in their armchair—intimately, as a friend. That was harder to do tonight, of course, knowing I was also having to talk to a second person, sitting in the shadows of the room.” He took a sip of water. “Herr Hitler.”
• Henderson looked again at the last page. “Not much of a straw to clutch at, but I suppose it’s something.” He gave the letter to his young aide. “Translate it and telegraph it to London immediately, will you, please? No need for cipher.” He insisted on showing Hartmann to the door. His manners were as exquisite as his clothes. He was rumoured to be a lover of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He had once turned up at the Chancellery wearing a crimson pullover under his pale grey suit: Hitler was said to have gone on about it for days afterwards. What were the British thinking of, Hartmann wondered, sending such a man to deal with the Nazis?
• When the Germans had reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, Wigram had asked to see the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and had warned him that in his opinion this was the Allies’ last chance to stop the Nazis... Oh, Ralph, thought Legat, poor dear cracked Ralph, you saw it all.
• It was disconcerting to hear Hitler’s demands coming out of Chamberlain’s mouth. It made them sound quite reasonable. After all, why should the Czech Government object to the immediate occupation of territory which they had already conceded in principle should be transferred to Germany? “ ‘This represents no more than a security measure which is intended to guarantee a quick and smooth achievement of the final settlement.’ ” When they complained about the loss of their border fortifications, surely the world could see they were only stalling for time? “ ‘If one were to wait for the entry into force of the final settlement in which Czechoslovakia had completed new fortifications in the territory that remained to her, it would doubtless take months and years.’ ” And so it went on. It was almost as if Hitler had been given a seat at the Cabinet table to make his case.
• The awfulness of the day overwhelmed him: the abandoned lunch, the workmen in Green Park, the barrage balloons rising over the Thames, the gas masks for his children, the car pulling away from the kerb in North Street…And tomorrow would be worse. Tomorrow the Germans would mobilise and he would be questioned by the Secret Intelligence Service.
• The truth about Hitler, I came to realise over the summer, is that he actually wants war with Czechoslovakia. He is under the delusion that he is some kind of military genius, even though he never rose higher than corporal.
• Increasingly these days the face he shaved was his father’s. A face from a sepia photograph: manly, resolute, oddly innocent.
• They had both behaved like children. It had been madness. And now the world had grown old and ugly around them.
• from the breast and flanks of a little owl…’ ” The Prime Minister tapped the paper with his finger. “I have observed exactly the same behaviour by the little owls at Chequers.” Mrs. Chamberlain said, “Oh, Neville, really! As if Hugh hasn’t got enough to do!” Legat said, “Actually, I believe it was my grandfather on my mother’s side who helped introduce the little owl to the British Isles.” “Did he really?” For the first time the Prime Minister looked at him with genuine interest. “Yes, he brought several pairs back with him from India.”
• How much of this was true? Some of it? None of it? Hartmann had no idea. Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.
• He had mixed with their type all his life: patriotic, conservative, clannish. For them, Hitler was like some crude gamekeeper who had mysteriously contrived to take over the running of their family estates: once installed, he had proved an unexpected success, and they had consented to tolerate his occasional bad manners and lapses into violence in return for a quiet life. Now they had discovered they couldn’t get rid of him and they looked as if they were starting to regret it.
• He described his two visits to Hitler as if he were a Victorian explorer at the Royal Geographical Society reporting on his expeditions to meet some savage warlord. “On 15th September I made my first flight to Munich. Thence I travelled by train to Herr Hitler’s mountain home at Berchtesgaden…
• He followed its progress as it travelled from hand to hand like a lit fuse until it reached Dunglass, who opened it with his usual slightly goofy expression and read it. Immediately he leaned forward to murmur in the ear of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who put his hand over his shoulder and took the note.
• Six men! Hartmann found it hard to restrain his contempt. Six men to bring down a dictatorship that controlled every aspect of life and society in a country that had swollen to eighty million? He felt naive and humiliated. The whole thing was a joke.
• “That’s too simplistic. It was always understood that the only circumstances in which the Army would take action would be if they were convinced there was going to be a war against France and Britain.” “Because they thought that Germany would lose?” “Exactly.” “So let us be clear about the logic of the Army’s position. They have no moral objection to Hitler’s regime; their opposition is entirely conditional on the country’s military prospects?”
• The communiqué made it seem as if the whole thing had been Hitler’s idea. And people would believe it, thought Hartmann, because people believed what they wanted to believe—that was Goebbels’s great insight. They no longer had any need to bother themselves with inconvenient truths. He had given them an excuse not to think.
• He used to complain that he lacked “the one great characteristic of the English, and that is distance—not only from one another but from all experience: I believe it is the secret of the English art of living.”
• This immensity was what he had never been able to convey to his Oxford friends, whose concept of their own nationality was so nicely bounded by a coast—this hard wide vast landscape, fertile in its genius, limitless in its possibilities, which demanded a constant effort of will and imagination to order into a modern state. <...> To the English ear one invariably came across as a German nationalist—although what was wrong with that? The corruption of honest patriotism was one of the many things for which Hartmann would never forgive the Austrian corporal.
• ‘What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!’ But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.”
• “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m supposed to be neutral. But one rather got carried away by the mood. I should think nine-tenths of the country were relieved.” The thin smile came again. “Yes, even the socialists were on their feet. It seems we are all appeasers now.”
• Household names gleamed with grim cheerfulness through the pouring rain—Gillette, Beecham’s Powders, Firestone Tyre & Rubber. Chamberlain must have been responsible for a lot of this development, thought Legat, when he was Minister of Housing and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. The country had come through the Depression and was prosperous again.
• Ashton-Gwatkin was already seated in the back. He wore a heavy overcoat with an astrakhan collar. He was perspiring profusely in the heat. “What an absolute beast,” he murmured as the SS man moved away. He turned his hooded eyes on Legat. Legat knew him by reputation only—the most brilliant classicist of his year at Oxford even though he had left without taking a degree, a Japanese scholar, the husband of a ballerina, childless, a poet, a novelist whose lurid bestseller, Kimono, had caused such resentment in Tokyo he had had to be recalled—and now an expert on the economy of the Sudetenland!
• The Gestapo man was standing listening in the doorway. “As I have explained, they are not allowed to participate in the conference. My orders are that they are to wait in their hotel room until further instructions have been issued.” “Therefore we are under arrest!” “Not at all. You are free to return to the airport and fly back to Prague whenever you wish.”
• It began with his analysis of Germany’s increasing need for food, acknowledged the unsustainability of its economy at the present pace of rearmament and warned of the Third Reich’s vulnerability to international trade sanctions and disruption of supply. The only remedy, and one which might appear to us as visionary, lay in the acquisition of greater living space… The space necessary to ensure it can only be sought in Europe…
• After their first meeting Chamberlain had described him to the Cabinet as “the commonest little dog you ever saw.” The Cabinet Secretary had cleaned this up in the minutes to read “there was nothing out of the common about his features.” Legat had thought it snobbish at the time but now he could see what the Prime Minister had meant. It was almost compelling how nondescript he was
• Hitler seemed not to have heard him. “But Chamberlain!” He pronounced the name with sarcastic distaste, extending the vowels so that it sounded like an obscenity. “This ‘Chamberlain’ haggles over every village and petty interest like a market stallkeeper! Do you know, gentlemen, he wanted assurances that the Czech farmers expelled from the Sudetenland would be permitted to take their pigs and cows with them? Can you imagine the bourgeois triviality of a mind that can be bothered with such details? He demanded indemnities for every public building!”
• He didn’t resent him for embarrassing him in front of the Prime Minister. It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available. Paul had got it right that night when he had stood on the parapet of Magdalen Bridge: “Ours is a mad generation…” Their destinies had been mapped from the moment they met.
• The silence was palpable, as if nobody wished to be there, like guests at an arranged wedding. The moment the photograph was taken the group broke up.
• The concentration camp was on the left, clearly visible against the moonlit sky—a high barbed-wire fence stretching as far as Legat could see, with watchtowers, and behind them the low outlines of barracks. The barking of guard dogs carried on the still air. A searchlight mounted on one of the towers prodded ceaselessly across a vast parade ground. It was the immensity of it that was most shocking: a captive town within a town.
• “Stalin has vastly bigger camps, where people are treated even worse. Do you want us to go to war with the Soviet Union as well?” “I merely point out that some of the people transferred into Germany by the agreement today may well end up in here by the end of the year.”
• proposal was that they should go and stand outside it in the hope that they might catch a glimpse of him. Hartmann had been against it from the start. He had called it a waste of a good day, a trivial bourgeois diversion (“Isn’t that what you people call it?”) to focus upon an individual rather than upon the social forces that had created him.
• “This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught in Oxford: the power of unreason. Everyone said—by everyone I mean people like me—we all said, ‘Oh, he’s a terrible fellow, Hitler, but he’s not necessarily all bad. Look at his achievements. Put aside this awful medieval anti-Jew stuff: it will pass.’ But the point is, it won’t pass. You can’t isolate it from the rest. It’s there in the mix. And if the anti-Semitism is evil, it’s all evil. Because if they’re capable of that, they’re capable of anything.”
• “Of course, what I really ought to do is blow his brains out. But everything I am prevents me, and besides, the one sure consequence would be a bloodbath—certainly all my family would be destroyed. So in the end one goes on in hope. What a terrible thing hope is! We would all be much better off without it. There is an Oxford paradox to end with.”
• And that was Legat’s lasting image of the famous moment—carried burned into the retina of his memory until the day of his death, many years later, as an honoured public servant—the jagged black figure at the centre of a great bright light, his arm stretched out, like a man who had thrown himself onto an electrified fence.
• He never ceased to wonder at the quality of the silence when the children were asleep.
• “It’s simply relief. And I don’t blame people for it. When I look at the children, I feel it myself. But all that’s happened really is that a tripwire has been laid down for the future. And Hitler will cross it, sooner or later.”