Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

268 DER FUEHRERshould ever evacuate the Rhineland; if Germany, after inner changesthat were not yet foreseeable, should again have an army deserving thename; and if she should dare to send a part of this army into herrecovered western province — then Germany was breaking the Treatyof Locarno, and England and Italy had 'immediately to come to the help'of France. But — what was 'help'?This was prudently left undefined, and thus for practical purposes thehelp remained a vague word on paper. France expected an Englishblockade fleet on the German North Sea coast, an English army in theChannel ports, English air squadrons over the Rhine. But neither SirAusten Chamberlain nor his legal adviser, Sir Cecil Hurst, meantanything so thundering and irresistible by their 'help.' They thought ofsharp, diplomatic notes, a shaming condemnation of the aggressor byinternational conferences, at most the calling-in of credits, the severanceof commercial or even diplomatic relations. England, dreaming away inher island, with her eyes turned toward five continents and sevenoceans, could not make up her mind to see the absolute focus of currenthistory and her own fate in these three hundred miles along the Rhine.Yet in this European isthmus of nations where France and Germanytouched through a relatively narrow breach in the wall of little neutralstates, the fate of mankind was being decided. Forty million Frenchmenthen (1925) faced sixty-six million Germans — could the future of theremaining twenty-four hundred million inhabitants of the globe dependon these one hundred and six millions? It did; but observers outside ofthe Continent simply could not grasp the fact.Even less could the world realize that its fate, for example, shoulddepend on the existence and prosperity of Poland and Czechoslovakia— these countries no bigger than pin-points, scarcely visible amid theoceans and continents? These small and medium states in the East owedtheir immediate origin to the war against Germany and the Peace ofVersailles had expressly thrust them into the flank of Germany likethorns. But left to themselves, Poland and Czechoslovakia clung ratherhelplessly to the feet of the German giant, who was slowly awakeningfrom the paralysis of defeat and beginning to move again. At the sametime a new life