"I should've done more..." thought Neville Chamberlain. "I couldn't do more," the ex-Prime Minister said to himself.
Guilty was eating him alive. It had been six months; Chamberlain knew he only had a couple of hours left. He wanted to go with a smile; he knew that was impossible. There was no happy end to his story; the last image Chamberlain would see would be the same he saw for the previous six months:
30 September 1938
Munich
And at the end of the paper, his signature.
"I should've stood out; I should've said no to Hitler and his invasions. But we were broken! Roosevelt kept collecting our war debt to fund his New Deal; the American Great Depression hit us hard in more than one way. Our military was still in ruins because of the War and because we had no money. We had no way to fight a war. No one wanted another war; I didn't want another war. I didn't want to see the British with gas masks, digging trenches and dying. Were four years not enough?"
Chamberlain sighed; there was so much he wanted to say, to do, but his body was weak. He couldn't even speak; all he could do was think, regret and die. Maybe, just maybe, if he could talk, yell, things would be better. But he couldn't, so he was stuck inside his mind with his regrets.
"I tried to avoid war; I did all I could've done to prevent another war. I failed," the former Prime Minister cried; everyone thought it was the cancer, it wasn't. It was the regrets.
"I should've done more; I couldn't do more. May history judge me fairly."
Neville Chamberlain died of bowel cancer on November 9, 1940. He was 71. His action and inactions toward Hitler's Germany will always be the most significant part of his history.
THE END
*****
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS (18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British politician of the Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, conceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
