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His failure after Munich was less spectacular, but more costly. Not only was war hateful to him, but all military and naval matters were distasteful. When Hitler broke his word of honor as a gentleman and occupied the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, Chamberlain determined that Britain must rearm. But he believed that rearmament would be used for negotiation, not for war. And so the rearmament of Britain was mostly on paper, and Hitler also knew that.
Chamberlain was too stubborn to quit as Prime Minister until he was forced to quit, too stubborn to quit the Government then. His last months were bitter. The cancer that gnawed at his vitals was a part of his personal feud with Hitler, and like most people who have that disease he clung to life while hating it. When it became clear that his operation had not saved his life for long, he resigned from the Cabinet at last.
When they moved him from London to his aunt's house in Hampshire, he knew he was dying, but still he ordered the secret kept. He was too proud to ask for sympathy. He lay in a room whose windows looked out on a grove of larch trees, with placid fields beyond. His wife stayed with him. Occasionally his thin lips curled back from his long, uneven teeth in a grimace of pain. Once a German airman flew over Oldharn Village and dropped a rack of bombs. One fell within 40 yards of where Chamberlain lay and the man who had said "I think it is peace in our time" shuddered. When the end was near they gave him drugs to dull the pain. Later he sank into a coma. After a while he died.
One of his friends had said of him: "Neville is a man to die with, but not for." Chamberlain had died for his country, in his own queer, lonely way, while his country still fought for its life. It was too soon to know whether the life and death of Neville Chamberlain was the tragedy of a man and a class, or of a nation, an empire and a race.