As a matter of fact, everyone who had eyes to see could see trouble coming. Indeed, the reason why the public was so happy about the Munich treaty is that everyone had been expecting war. To have an agreement signed seemed a miracle of diplomacy. And the British were increasingly aware of the fragility and overstretch of the imperial commitments. I can tell you all of this from documents of the time - books, magazines, newspapers - which I have and have read. Furthermore, the previous eighteen years had not had a single year of quiet in ten. From 1919 to 1922 there had been the constant threat of involvement in the civil wars in Russia and Turkey; the conscious British decision to stay out of these left the post-war settlement in tatters and the fearsome tyranny of Lenin in control of a colossal empire. Lenin immediately, even as he was still fighting to control the territory, committed immense resources and tens - soon hundreds - of thousands of operatives to the expansion of Communism abroad by all means, fair and foul. Continuous Communist subversion in all fields had been the background to world politics from 1917 onwards. Meanwhile Italy had fallen into the hands of a warmongering tyrant, and to appease him, Britain yelded a number of colonial territories (1925). In 1923, the German government, that had never accepted even the mild terms of the Versailles treaty, deliberately destroyed its own currency in the hope of forcing a re-negotiation. France, Belgium and Italy reacted by occupying the Ruhr; Britain took GErmany's side, and for weeks there was a serious possibility of war between Britain and France. This left a heritage of distrust and dislike between two countries that, faced with an always fearsome Germany, a surly Italy and a massively hostile and subversive Russia, desperately needed each other. In 1929, America collapsed, and Europe was left to contemplate the terrible spectacle of a capitalist economy, as it then seemed, dying. They had two good years to contemplate all the worst that a Depression could do to a country; and then, in 1931, two years later than in America, the Great Depression, having given plenty of fore-warning, struck Europe, and never lifted. The thirties were a time of constant and continuously increasing threats of war; by 1935, great powers were at war in Ethiopia, then in Spain, then in China - the war in 1939 was no more than the end of an infernal cycle, and to start the world war on Sept. 1, 1939, has always seemed to me a highly Eurocentric and narrow attitude. Ethiopia had been at war for four years by then, and China for two.