Put Out More Flags

By Evelyn Waugh

FATUOUS “smart” people, many of whom might have stepped out of an early Aldous Huxley novel, survivals, according to their age, of the nineties or the twenties; an amusing rotter who expertly explo them and uses the war as a means for chicanery; and most of the rest of England running about trying to create an illusion of being absorbed in war work: this during the year or so of what was then called the Phony War or the Great Bore War. These ghosts, as Mr. Waugh calls them, suggest that the war itself is better than the frame of mind it killed. “I find more food for thought,” he says, “in the follies of Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk than in the sagacity of the Higher Command.” If the reader is very thoughtful, he may find them so too. Silk and his circle represent the fatuities of the Intellectuals of the time; but Seal is the realist without conscience, the Nazi in essence, though he is much more amusing than any avowed Nazi. His little scheme of using a family of nauseous refugees as a bludgeon over the heads of well-meaning people of means, who pay heavily in cold cash not to have to receive them, is even better — or worse — than Falstaff’s little scheme of recruiting. Basil sticks in the mind as clever rascals will. The satire on red tape, stuffed shirts, the War Office, is balanced by Freddy Sothill, Peter Pastmaster, Alastair Trumpington, and especially Cedric, who represent the plain British doggedness and deeds-without-fuss. The war, when it really started, suddenly sent some of the ghosts back to their tombs and made others into flesh-and-blood people. R. M. G.