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agreement under which Poland was to be partitioned between Germany and Russia.
    This pact made war certain, and all the more so because of the lateness of the timing. Hitler could not draw back on the Polish issue without serious loss of face in Moscow. Moreover, his belief that the British Government would not venture on an obviously futile struggle to preserve Poland, and did not really wish to bring in Russia, had been freshly fostered by the way that Chamberlain had, in late July, started private negotiations with him through his trusted adviser, Sir Horace Wilson, for an Anglo-German pact.
    But the Soviet-German Pact, coming so late, did not have the effect on the British that Hitler had reckoned. On the contrary, it aroused the ‘bulldog’ spirit — of blind determination, regardless of the consequences. In that state of feeling, Chamberlain could not stand aside without both loss of face and breach of promise.
    Stalin had been only too well aware that the Western Powers had long been disposed to let Hitler expand eastward — in Russia’s direction. It is probable that he saw the Soviet-German Pact as a convenient device by which he could divert Hitler’s aggressive dynamism in the opposite direction. In other words, by this nimble side-step he would let his immediate and potential opponents crash into one another. At the least this should produce a diminution of the threat to Soviet Russia, and might well result in such common exhaustion on their part as to ensure Russia’s post-war ascendancy.
    The Pact meant the removal of Poland as a buffer between Germany and Russia — but the Russians had always felt that the Poles were more likely to serve as a spearhead for a German invasion of Russia than as a barricade against it. By collaborating in Hitler’s conquest of Poland, and dividing it with him, they would not only be taking an easy way of regaining their pre-1914 property but be able to convert eastern Poland into a barrier space which, though narrower, would be held by their own forces. That seemed a more reliable buffer than an independent Poland. The Pact also paved the way for Russia’s occupation of the Baltic States and Bessarabia, as a wider extension of the buffer.
    In 1941, after Hitler had swept into Russia, Stalin’s 1939 side-step looked a fatally short-sighted shift. It is likely that Stalin overestimated the Western nations’ capacity for resisting, and thus exhausting, Germany’s power. It is likely, too, that he also overestimated the initial resisting power of his own forces. Nevertheless, surveying the European situation in later years, it does not seem so certain as in 1941 that his side-step proved to Soviet Russia’s disadvantage.
    For the West, on the other hand, it brought immeasurable harm. The primary blame for that lies with those who were responsible for the successive policies of procrastination and precipitation — in face of a palpably explosive situation.
    Dealing with Britain’s entry into the war — after describing how she allowed Germany to re-arm and then to swallow Austria and Czecho-Slovakia, while at the same time spurning Russia’s proposals for joint action — Churchill says:
     
 . . . when every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand, to guarantee the integrity of Poland — of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State. There was sense in fighting for Czecho-Slovakia in 1938, when the German Army could scarcely put half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled forward across the Rhine or into the Ruhr. But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western democracies declared themselves ready to stake their