‘You are very welcome!’ I responded in the same tone.

Eden asked me about our position, and reminisced about the past, his visit to Moscow, and our meetings and conversations during his stint at the Foreign Office. He remarked: ‘You know, the hardest thing for me during that time was to convince my friends that Hitler and Mussolini were quite different from British business men or country gentlemen as regards their psychology, motivations, and modes of action. My friends simply refused to believe me. They thought I was biased against the dictators and refused to understand them. I kept saying: “When you converse with the Führer or the Duce, you feel at once that you are dealing with an animal of an entirely different breed from yourself.” Some of our statesmen subsequently tried to approach the dictators in the same manner as they would approach business men. The results are well known.’

Then we discussed current events. According to Eden, the British government is in a state of great bewilderment. Numerous symptoms and pieces of information clearly foretold the beginning of a German onslaught on England on 6 July. Today is the 12 July, but there has been no attack. Why not? Members of the government are speculating, but are unable to reach any definite conclusion.

I suggested that the attack may have been deferred because of the fate of the French fleet. What if the initial plans for an attack had been based on the assumption that the Germans would have the French fleet in their hands, and now, after the events of 2–3 July, all these plans had to be revised. Such a process requires time.

Eden found my idea most interesting and, on the assumption that it was correct, began to develop it. He said, among other things, that whatever the reasons for the delay may be, the British government was very glad about it. It has more time to prepare. From the sea, England is now fully protected. The situation in the air is more complicated. True, the airfields are properly guarded, but there are too many natural landing strips in the country. An intensive effort is under way to ‘spoil’ them. All available digging machines in England have been recruited for the task. Teams of volunteers are also helping out. The outskirts of most big cities are already fairly ‘spoiled’, but two more weeks are needed to complete the destruction of natural landing strips all over the country. It would be good if the Germans gave the British this fortnight.

According to Eden, a large force is being massed in Northern Ireland. Since a joint Anglo-Irish defence of the entire island has not yet been agreed upon with de Valera, the British government has decided to muster a concentrated force in the north which could be deployed in any part of Ireland in case of emergency.

The causes of the France defeat were the last topic of conversation. In general, Eden has a fair grasp of these causes. I asked whether anything similar could happen in England, too.

Eden categorically rejected this possibility.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we too have such men as Laval, but they do not play a major role and carry no weight in government. Besides, our army, or at least the greater part of it, has already fought with the Germans and found that “the devil is never so black as he is painted”. This is terribly important. On the whole, army morale is high, and I do not expect any unpleasant surprises on this score.’

[Eden was impressed enough by Maisky’s analysis of the prospects for a German invasion to send Churchill a personal brief:

A prominent American journalist observed that ‘Maisky, with his practical grasp of day-by-day changes in thought and emotion, his genial but unruffled contemplation of the whole war in all its details, seemed to me one of the most thoroughly competent observers I had the fortune to meet in England.’

Sheean, Between the Thunder and the Sun, p. 203.

]