Adolf Hitler was not a happy man. Oh, yes, he was going to get Czechoslovakia. The British and French had come here to hand him his hateful neighbor-what an abortion of a country! one more crime of Versailles!-all trussed up on a silver platter, ready for the slaughter.

But, for all the fuss the Sudeten Germans had kicked up inside Czechoslovakia (fuss orchestrated from the Reich), to Hitler the Slavic state wasn’t an end in itself, only a means to an end. The end was dominating Europe. Had that required dropping the Sudeten German Party he’d fed and watered for so long, he would have dropped it like a live grenade.

Getting his hands on Czechoslovakia would be nice, yes. What he really wanted, though, was war.

He was ready. He was convinced the enemy wasn’t. Chamberlain and Daladier wouldn’t have been so pathetically eager to sell their ally down the river if they were.

The trouble was, they were too damned eager. They kept falling all over themselves to make whatever concessions he demanded. The more they yielded, the less excuse he had to send in the Wehrmacht.

His generals would be relieved if he got what he wanted without fighting. He wasn’t happy with the halfhearted way so many of them were readying themselves and their units. And Mussolini, while a good fellow, had more chin than balls. The Duce kept insisting Italy wasn’t ready to take on England and France, and wouldn’t be for another two or three years.

“Dummkopf,” Hitler muttered under his breath. The real point, the point Mussolini didn’t get, was that England and France weren’t ready. Not only did they not want war, their factories weren’t geared up for it. And the Russians were in even worse shape. Every day, it seemed, Stalin knocked off a new general, or a handful of them. When the Reds laid on a purge, they didn’t fool around.