Books: True Bill

GUILTY MEN— “Cato”— Stokes($1.50).

This short, slim book of some 140 pages caused an uproar in England. It indicted the former members of the Chamberlain Government, several of whom have remained in the Churchill Government, largely by stating their records, and suggested that the British Isles would be a little more buoyant if these men were dropped overboard. When certain British booksellers refused to handle distribution of Guilty Men in the usual way, news dealers took it over, sold eager Britons 50,000 copies of the book in three weeks. Last week it appeared in the U. S.

The author of Guilty Men (“Cato”) shrouds himself, for reasons which nobody seems to know, in a thick British fog. He has been guessed to be Winston Church ill’s son Randolph, H. G. Wells, Lord Beaverbrook, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Alfred Duff Cooper. All flatly deny authorship. At any rate Guilty Men is terse, biting, sometimes eloquent, gives every appear ance of careful, responsible judgment. The charges are not new. But the total indictment is terrible. Guilty Men is headed by a cast sheet of villains. Among them: Ramsay MacDonald, Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, Neville Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Halifax, Sir Thomas Inskip, Mr. Leslie Burgin, a half-dozen others.

The patriotism of these men is not questioned. No fifth column is mentioned. The charges against them are appeasement, playing politics with national defense, negligence in face of danger, blundering, in eptitude, plain stupidity. Most crushing part of the indictment is the simple quota tions in Chapter I from survivors of the Battle of Flanders — brief, unemotional statements about the enemy’s superiority in equipment, casual comments that it is “the story of an Army doomed before they took the field.” The rest of the book is a true bill against the politicians who doomed these soldiers.

Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin “took over a great empire, supreme in arms and secure in liberty. They conducted it to the edge of national annihilation.” Next on the list is Sir Samuel Hoare.

“Like the Abbe Sieyes who was asked what he had done in the Great French Revolution, Sir Samuel could faithfully reply: ‘I kept alive.’ ” Hoare’s record includes negotiating, without the knowledge of the French, the British-German naval pact, selling Haile Selassie out in the Hoare-Laval agreement. In fact, “as Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.”

When “the apple blossom of Bewdley” made way for “the hardware of Birmingham,” Neville Chamberlain, the era of grand blunders had begun. High point, of course, was Munich. “Cato” does not believe that Chamberlain had to back down at Munich. Said the Prime Minister to somebody who questioned Hitler’s promises at Munich: “Ah, but this time he promised me.”

Quipped a parliamentary wag about Sir Thomas Inskip’s appointment in 1936 as Defense Minister: “There has been no similar appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse a Consul.” Winston Churchill remarked that Sir Thomas was perfectly right in saying that the Army was being mechanized— “in the sense that its horses are being taken away from it.” Said Sir Thomas: “Sometimes I do not feel very well equipped for my office.” He held it three years. Just after the British troops sailed for Norway without proper weapons or supplies, Minister of Supply Leslie Burgin was photographed holding up a white snow suit. No British Expeditionary Force, he was reported to have said, had ever been so well equipped.

Says “Cato” in closing: “Let the guilty men retire, then, of their own volition, and so make an essential contribution to the victory upon which all are implacably resolved.”