September 1938

September 1938 is the novel’s compressed historical present, the month in which the threat of war and the effort to avert it converge on Munich. Adolf Hitler is determined to start a war; Neville Chamberlain is desperate to preserve peace. As the two leaders travel toward the city, Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann—once close friends at Oxford, separated for six years, and now carrying secrets of their own—are drawn back into one another’s paths while the future of Europe hangs in the balance.

The Month and the Crisis

The month’s significance lies in the collision between political urgency and the possibility that events can still be redirected. Munich is presented not simply as a destination but as the city where the issue will be decided, its later notoriety already shadowing the negotiations. The novel sets Chamberlain’s peace-making effort against Hitler’s determination to use force, while the two young men’s return to Munich brings private histories into the same landscape as the European crisis.

Tuesday, 27 September

The account fixes the immediate crisis in London shortly before one o’clock on Tuesday, 27 September 1938. At the restaurant at The Ritz, London, Legat orders half a bottle of 1921 Dom Perignon that he cannot afford, opens The Times to page seventeen, and reads for the third time the speech Adolf Hitler delivered the previous night at Berlin Sportpalast. The small, precise details of lunch and repeated reading place the political emergency inside an ordinary afternoon; the speech’s force is measured by how insistently Legat returns to it.

The Deadline Tightens

That evening, the Cabinet discussion reaches its limit as the light fades and the time approaches seven-thirty. Neville Chamberlain brings the overlapping conversations to silence and ends the meeting for the moment, warning that the situation is as grave as it could be and that fewer than twenty hours remain before Germany’s ultimatum expires. He proposes further discussion with the Foreign Secretary and Sir Horace Wilson about a possible telegram to the Government of Czechoslovakia. The unresolved question is therefore both diplomatic and immediate: whether a further message can be sent before the deadline runs out.

The chapter’s clock-time is made tangible in the room. As the service chiefs speak over one another, Legat watches Chamberlain glance at the mantelpiece clock and return to his speech; the narration compares the Prime Minister’s persistence to the hall’s grandfather clock, continuing its steady tick. At seven-thirty Legat interrupts to say that the British Broadcasting Corporation needs to set up its equipment. Engineers lay cables across the carpet and place a large cylindrical microphone beside the Cabinet table, turning the room from a site of private deliberation toward public communication. September’s pressure thus gathers in a sequence of narrowing hours: a speech read again at lunch, an unfinished policy question at evening, and broadcast equipment installed while the ultimatum continues to count down.