Foreign News: End of a Missionary

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 7 [1939], we reached Victoria Station. . . . My mission to Berlin had terminated, and the failure was complete.

What Sir Nevile Meyrich Henderson felt when he wrote these concluding words to his book, Failure of a Mission, no one knows. Certainly he had a sense of failure. "Peace was my big objective," he wrote of his two and a half years as British Ambassador in Berlin. "I did not go to Berlin to curse, but where possible to bless." When he stepped off the train in London, Great Britain had declared war on...

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