Beneath Gray Skies Read Online Free PDF Page A

British Cabinet had lost a son, a nephew or some other close relation in the trenches of Flanders, the beaches of Gallipoli, or the hell of Mesopotamia, and had no wish to see a repeat of the Great European War. “I’m sure that applies to the Germans as much as it does to us. God knows the poor blighters suffered enough.”
     
    “They did, but if they felt they had enough potential to make the weapons, and if they were backed by a large force, like the Confederate Army, the Nazis are perfectly capable of arousing enough national sentiment. One of their slogans is ‘Germany, awake’, after all.”
     
    “As if we hadn’t had enough problems putting the beggars to sleep last time,” remarked the Home Secretary.
     
    “With all their talk about the purity of the German race, they’ll probably want to try and sweep all the German-speakers in Europe into a new empire. That would mean most of what was Austria-Hungary, and parts of Poland. And don’t forget all the rubbish about the Jews. Hitler’s said in his speeches that Germany must be free of Jews.”
     
    “This isn’t the Middle Ages. You can’t go around expelling a whole race of people from your country,” objected the Home Secretary.
     
    “Whatever you may think, this is what Hitler’s saying. There’s a crackpot called Julius Streicher from whom Hitler’s got most of his ideas, and let’s face it, the Jews have never been very popular in that part of the world. Hitler may be mad, but unfortunately, a lot of Germans are listening to him.”
     
    “Shouldn’t we be listening to him, too?” came a voice. “It does sound as though he has the right idea about the Communists, anyway. And I don’t know that much about the German Jews, but I think we’d be a damn’ sight better off without ours.”
     
    There was a murmur of agreement from a few voices around the table, matched by an equal or larger number of angry dissenting murmurs.
     
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up, Charles,” came another voice. “We don’t all suffer from your bee in the bonnet about the Jews. The poor bastards have suffered enough from the Russian and Polish pogroms over the past years and the Bolsheviks don’t seem to have sorted things out in Russia as far as that’s concerned. In any case, Arthur Balfour’s as good as promised the Jews that they can all go off and live in Palestine, which I for one think is a bloody stupid idea. It’s not ours to give away, and there are people there already who aren’t going to welcome a whole crowd pushing their way in.”
     
    “And I’m all for sending them over there. We don’t all have your Quaker-like tolerance of the whole of God’s creation, Reggie. I may pray in church every Sunday for all sorts and conditions of men, but it doesn’t mean that I have to like them, even if you take it to mean you have to treat the lower classes as equals.”
     
    “Personally, I think we’re better off with our Jews in England, and not making fools of ourselves in that part of the world.”
     
    “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” interrupted the Prime Minister. “Can we come to the point, please? The question is not what we are going to do about British Jewry, or what sort of role we should be playing in Palestine, but whether we allow Herr Hitler to have a free hand to persecute his Jews in Germany.”
     
    “It’s not just a question of the Jews, Prime Minister. There’s the whole question of whether we want a Hitler government in Germany forming an alliance with the Confederacy. Leaving out any moral question of Jews and Negroes, an awakened militaristic Germany with access to all those raw materials would be a disaster for European security.”
     
    “As if we didn’t have enough of those disasters already with Russia,” added a voice.
     
    “Well, personally,” said the Prime Minister, “I don’t want to sound all priggish about this, but it does seem to me that we have a moral duty to frustrate the Confederacy. The