Hitler's Table Talk

EXPERIENCE WITH TWO AMBASSADORS 275
pregnable position—else it's a waste of money. The English
have lived on the idea of an invincibility whose image is invoked
for them by the magic names of Shanghai, Hongkong
and Singapore. Suddenly they have to sing smaller, and
realise that this magnificent façade was merely a bluff. I agree,
it's a terrible blow for the English.
I've been told that an English statesman left a will in which
he reminded his compatriots of the following sacred truth : that
the only danger to England was Germany !
François-Poncet did not want the war. The reports dating
from the end of his mission to Berlin are worthless, in my view.
The little vulgarities in which he indulged at my expense had
no other object but to prove to his compatriots that he wasn't
contaminated by us. If he had said in his reports what he really
thought, he'd have been recalled at once. In all his reports,
he insisted on the necessity of following the evolution of the
situation in Germany with close attention.
Poncet is the most intelligent of the diplomats I've known-—
including the German ones, of course. I'd not have risked
discussing German literature with him, for I'd have been put
out of countenance. When he said good-bye to me at the Gralsburg,
he was very much moved. He told me he'd done everything
humanly possible, but that in Paris he was regarded as a
man won over to our cause. "The French are a very clever
people," he added. "There's not a Frenchman who doesn't
believe that in my place he would do much better than I."
François-Poncet speaks absolutely perfect German. He once
made a speech at Nuremberg that began: "Now that I've had
conferred upon me the dignity of an orator of the National-
Socialist Party . . ." I've forgiven him all his remarks about
me. If meet him, I shall confine myself to saying to him: "It's
dangerous to give one's opinion in writing on people whom one
does not entirely know. It's better to do it viva voce."
Our difficulties on the subject of Morocco were smoothed out
by him in two days. Henderson and Poncet certainly both had
connections in industry. Henderson, for his part, was interested
in seeing to it that war should come. Poncet was the