A Hush Over Europe

August 8, 1939
Broadcast to the United States from London
Before the House of Commons summer recess, Churchill
makes one final effort to arouse the Great Republic, his
term of endearment for the United States, from its
reveries, barely four weeks before the outbreak of war in
Europe.
Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen! Holiday time, my
friends across the Atlantic! Holiday time, when the
summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief
spell from the offices and mills and stiff routine of daily life
and breadwinning, and sends them to seek if not rest at
least change in new surroundings, to return refreshed and
keep the myriad wheels of civilized society on the move.
Let me look back-let me see. How did we spend our
summer holidays twenty-five years ago? Why, those were
the very days when the German advance guards were
breaking into Belgium and trampling down its people on
their march towards Paris! Those were the days when
Prussian militarism was -to quote its own phrase-"hacking
its way through the small, weak, neighbor country" whose
neutrality and independence they had sworn not merely to

respect but to defend.

But perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps our memory deceives
us. Dr. Goebbels and his Propaganda Machine have their
own version of what happened twenty-five years ago. To
hear them talk, you would suppose that it was Belgium
that invaded Germany! There they were, these peaceful
Prussians, gathering in their harvests, when this wicked
Belgium - set on by England and the Jews - fell upon
them; and would no doubt have taken Berlin, if Corporal
Adolf Hitler had not come to the rescue and turned the
tables. Indeed, the tale goes further. After four years of
war by land and sea, when Germany was about to win an
overwhelming victory, the Jews got at them again, this
time from the rear. Armed with President Wilson's
Fourteen Points they stabbed, we are told, the German
armies in the back, and induced them to ask for an
armistice, and even persuaded them, in an unguarded
moment, to sign a paper saying that it was they and not
the Belgians who had been the ones to begin the War.
Such is history as it is taught in topsy-turvydom. And now
it is holiday again, and where are we now? Or, as you
sometimes ask in the United States - where do we go
from here?
There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world,
broken only by the dull thud of Japanese bombs falling on
Chinese cities, on Chinese Universities or near British and

American ships. But then, China is a long way off, so why

worry? The Chinese are fighting for what the founders of
the American Constitution in their stately language called:
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." And they seem
to be fighting very well. Many good judges think they are
going to win. Anyhow, let's wish them luck! Let's give
them a wave of encouragement - as your President did
last week, when he gave notice about ending the
commercial treaty. After all, the suffering Chinese are
fighting our battle, the battle of democracy. They are
defending the soil, the good earth, that has been theirs
since the dawn of time against cruel and unprovoked
aggression. Give them a cheer across the ocean - no one
knows whose turn it may be next. If this habit of military
dictatorships' breaking into other people's lands with
bomb and shell and bullet, stealing the property and
killing the proprietors, spreads too widely, we may none of
us be able to think of summer holidays for quite a while.
But to come back to the hush I said was hanging over
Europe. What kind of a hush is it? Alas! it is the hush of
suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen!
No, listen carefully; I think I hear something-yes, there it
was quite clear. Don't you hear it? It is the tramp of
armies crunching the gravel of the parade- grounds,
splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two
million German soldiers and more than a million Italians"going on maneuvers"-yes, only on maneuvers! Of course
it's only maneuvers just like last year. After all, the

Dictators must train their soldiers. They could scarcely do

less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the
Swiss, the Albanians and of course the Jews may leap out
upon them at any moment and rob them of their livingspace, and make them sign another paper to say who
began it. Besides, these German and Italian armies may
have another work of Liberation to perform. It was only
last year they liberated Austria from the horrors of selfgovernment. It was only in March they freed the
Czechoslovak Republic from the misery of independent
existence. It is only two years ago that Signor Mussolini
gave the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia its Magna Charta.
It is only two months ago that little Albania got its writ of
Habeas Corpus, and Mussolini sent in his Bill of Rights for
King Zog to pay. Why, even at this moment, the
mountaineers of the Tyrol, a German-speaking population
who have dwelt in their beautiful valleys for a thousand
years, are being liberated, that is to say, uprooted, from
the land they love, from the soil which Andreas Hofer died
to defend. No wonder the armies are tramping on when
there is so much liberation to be done, and no wonder
there is a hush among all the neighbors of Germany and
Italy while they are wondering which one is going to be
"liberated" next.
The Nazis say that they are being encircled. They have
encircled themselves with a ring of neighbors who have to
keep on guessing who will be struck down next. This kind
of guesswork is a very tiring game. Countries, especially

small countries, have long ceased to find it amusing. Can

you wonder that the neighbors of Germany, both great
and small, have begun to think of stopping the game, by
simply saying to the Nazis on the principle of the
Covenant of the League of Nations: "He who attacks any.
Attacks all. He who attacks the weakest will find he has
attacked the strongest"? That is how we are spending our
holiday over here, in poor weather, in a lot of clouds. We
hope it is better with you.
One thing has struck me as very strange, and that is the
resurgence of the one-man power after all these centuries
of experience and progress. It is curious how the Englishspeaking peoples have always had this horror of one-man
power. They are quite ready to follow a leader for a time,
as long as he is serviceable to them; but the idea of
handing themselves over, lock, stock and barrel, body and
soul, to one man, and worshiping him as if he were an
idol? That has always been odious to the whole theme and
nature of our civilization. The architects of the American
Constitution were as careful as those who shaped the
British Constitution to guard against the whole life and
fortunes, and all the laws and freedom of the nation,
being placed in the hands of a tyrant. Checks and counterchecks in the body politic, large devolutions of State
government, instruments and processes of free debate,
frequent recurrence to first principles, the right of
opposition to the most powerful governments, and above
all ceaseless vigilance, have preserved, and will preserve,

the broad characteristics of British and American

institutions. But in Germany, on a mountain peak, there
sits one man who in a single day can release the world
from the fear which now oppresses it; or in a single day
can plunge all that we have and are into a volcano of
smoke and flame.
If Herr Hitler does not make war, there will be no war. No
one else is going to make war. Britain and France are
determined to shed no blood except in self-defense or in
defense of their Allies. No one has ever dreamed of
attacking Germany. If Germany desires to be reassured
against attack by her neighbors, she has only to say the
word and we will give her the fullest guarantees in
accordance with the principles of the Covenant of the
League. We have said repeatedly we ask nothing for
ourselves in the way of security that we are not willing
freely to share with the German people.
Therefore, if war should come there can be no doubt upon
whose head the blood-guiltiness will fall. Thus lies the
great issue at this moment, and none can tell how itwill be
settled.
It is not, believe me, my American friends, from any
ignoble shrinking from pain and death that the British and
French peoples pray for peace. It is not because we have
any doubts how a struggle between Nazi Germany and the
civilized world would ultimately end that we pray tonight
and every night for peace. But whether it be peace or war,
peace with its broadening and brightening prosperity, now

within our reach, or war with its measureless carnage and

destruction-we must strive to frame some system of
human relations in the future which will bring to an end
this prolonged hideous uncertainty, which will let the
working and creative forces of the world get on with their
job, and which will no longer leave the whole life of
mankind dependent upon the virtues, the caprice, or the
wickedness of a single man.