“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

– Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September, 1939.
(The above link also leads on to the BBC audio file of the speech.)

Don’t you just love that use of the word “note?” (Chamberlain’s pronunciation made it sound more like “nit.”)

Not demand, not insistence.

Note.

How British, how understated, how public school. How ineffectual.

That note certainly put the wind right up the buggers, and no mistake.

That tree I mentioned last year is on the turn again.

I fogot to check it on Monday but made sure to yesterday and there were definite signs of yellow leaves.

Maybe it’s a species that just does this at the back end of August/beginning of September but it seems extremely early to me.

It might be another not very good winter.

Today is the anniversary of the main triggering of the calamity that overshadowed the second half of the Twentieth Century and hence loomed large in the childhoods of people, like me, born years after the events it precipitated.

Germany attacked Poland.

Though the war in Asia had been going on for some time following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria it was this European outbreak that signalled catastrophe would be a global affair.

Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) is reported to have said when he was asked what he thought were the implications of the French revolution that, “It is too early to say.”

The same is true of World War 2.