Word: simonal
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With her Rolls-Royce engines throbbing sweetly, a "Flying British Foreign Office" lofted up from Croydon this week, swept off across the Channel. Aboard were crack Whitehall diplomats fluent in German, and Sir John Simon who was reported to have sighed: "I could talk with Hitler in French if he could talk French...
...John's Chestnuts." As the Imperial Airways liner carrying Sir John Simon approached Amsterdam, it coasted down to a landing and aboard stepped the handsome young Oxonian fixer who likes to be called "Mr. Eden...
Despite French and Italian troop movements to the borders and the recent flare-up over Lithuanian treatment of Nazi agitators, European nations have settled into a state of suspended animation, largely due to Sir John Simon's visit to Germany. Again Britain, much to the dissatisfaction of her former allies, is playing her historic role of mediator and preserver of the balance of power. One of the most favorable signs in the present imbroglio has been the enthusiastic reception given by the German populace to Britain's part as the "honest broker...
Lawyerish Sir John Simon perhaps cannot believe that anyone would tear up a deck of cards. His nature is to assume that the game must go on and, being a game, must go on according to the rules. To their Embassy in Berlin the imperturbable British sent instructions to ask the German Government whether Adolf Hitler's invitation to Sir John Simon still stood; whether, assuming that it stood, the German Government remained anxious to obtain by bargain what they had purported to seize; whether, in effect, the Nazis are mad dogs or gentlemanly players of a gentleman...
Quick, however, was the Wilhelmstrasse's public reply that it did indeed expect Sir John Simon to make his visit. In London Sir John announced he would go. At this the French felt decidedly let down, since they had concluded from recent conversations that they would be consulted in such situations-and at the first important one had not. Paris learned of the British note and Sir John's decision only after the fact. But, most important to both onetime allies, Herr Hitler had neatly cut the ground from under their feet. All that Britain's Foreign...