Put Out More Flags – Evelyn Waugh, 1942 ★★

Mind You There's a War on

In September 1939 a 21-year British holiday from history came to a sharp end. War was declared and Poland carved up by Germany and Russia as the rest of the world looked on. It was time to strike back.

Only it wasn’t, not right away. First came something called the “Phoney War,” eight months of waiting and hoping. Just two years later, Evelyn Waugh set about mocking that time of simmering conflict and self-rationalization was as experienced by London’s smart set.

Put Out More Flags is a satire written in the anything-goes spirit of Waugh’s earlier, peacetime works. Government ministries set about planning ridiculous strategies, seeing the enemy everywhere but where they actually are, getting men killed by sheer lack of imagination.

Even now you wonder at the sheer gall of putting it in print:

“You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surréaliste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions – limbs and things lying about in odd places you know.”

At this and other times in the novel, you have to wonder how Put Out More Flags got past wartime censors. Yet it not only did but became an outstanding publishing success. That’s not an endorsement, however.

A larkish spirit permeated the early days of World War II, at least for the British. What was called the "sitzkrieg" involved a lot of waiting for Hitler's next blow. It didn't come until May 1940 but when it did, everything changed.
Image from https://www.history.org.uk/publications/resource/9689/the-phoney-war-teaching-wwii

Put Out More Flags is an extension of Vile Bodies where various superficial types are hoisted on petards of detached indifference. Instead of some drunk young toff crashing a party, however, Adolf Hitler does the honors, smashing the charade that was 1930s England.

“Faultless timing,” explains Basil Seal, the novel’s cheerfully amoral protagonist. “That’s always been Hitler’s strong point.”

Basil Seal, revealed as an epic bounder in Black Mischief, manages to outdo himself here. He betrays several friends, including Ambrose Silk, a fragile homosexual Seal falsely outs as a Nazi sympathizer. Seal also gets an entire ministry office blown up, though we are later told this could only help the war effort.

Most memorably, in an extended section, Seal forces upon various law-abiding citizens living in the country a trio of incorrigible brats who must be boarded, their being city evacuees from expected bombings. Basil’s trick is collecting bribes after to take the orphans back.

His orders to the children are simple:

“When you come to the house where I live you’re to behave, always. See? I may take you to other houses from time to time. There you can usually be as bad as you like, but not until I give the word. See?”

Leslie Hore-Belisha, U. K. Secretary of State for War from 1937-1940, was often criticized as unready for the onslaught that was World War II. He is often invoked in Put Out More Flags as an authority for taking some lack of action that proves ruinous.
1935 Punch cartoon by J. L. Carstairs from https://www.ebay.com/itm/195592707720

There are other characters in Put Out More Flags, not as ruthless as Basil but lacking in some way. The men are dim aristocrats given to the idea of service so long as they only have to act and not think about it too much. The women are smarter, but cager and more selfish.

There is laughter throughout the book, much of it in the form of whistling past the graveyard. The sense of a nation distracted by indifference and now getting a deserved comeuppance is all-pervading:

“Last war it was Belgian refugees. I suppose it will be Poles this time. It’s a great pity it isn’t people who talk a language one knows.”

Meanwhile, the gradual disintegration of assorted psyches by the realities of war makes for some of Waugh’s most compelling prose:

For seven years she had been on a desert island; her appearance had become a hobby and distraction, a pursuit entirely self-regarding and self-rewarding; she watched herself moving in the mirrors of the civilized world as a prisoner will watch the antics of a rat which he has domesticated to the dungeon.

A desire not to relive the experience of World War I, as seen by these Irish soldiers at the Somme in July 1916, informed the initial British war policy. Basil Seal's attitude is suggestive of this: "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war."
Image from https://today.duke.edu/2018/11/how-trauma-and-struggles-world-war-i-helped-shape-modern-world

Ambrose Silk rejects the pieties of both sides for his unreadable poetry and notes that in China, educated scholars didn’t care “a tinker's hoot” if their lands were invaded. A fusty old aristocrat, Sir Joseph Mainwaring, sees ridiculously silver linings in every cloud. The pact between Hitler and Stalin just makes him think it won’t be long until the Italians line up with England and France.

Urging her son Basil to enlist, Lady Seal hastens to add: “The Army is very full just at present. Things will be much easier when we have some casualties.”

Waugh dedicated this book to Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister, ostensibly in appreciation for letting Waugh become a commando but perhaps also for some political cover. Randolph’s father had been a vociferous critic of his country’s peacenik foreign policy back in the 1930s; certainly he might have related to this.

Yet it is a bleak picture Waugh paints, after some early chapters that play up how the war made its debut in London society. “One takes one’s gas-mask to one’s office but not to one’s club,” Sir Joseph explains, in between blisteringly ignorant observations about Germans never getting past the mighty Maginot Line.

Randolph Churchill, to whom Put Out More Flags was dedicated, standing with his more famous father. Like Winston, Randolph was widely known as a pre-war critic of appeasement policy. During the war he became an active commando. He and Waugh survived a July 1944 air crash on a mission off the Croatian coast.
Image from https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/churchill-son-review-the-cage-of-paternal-love-11617375841

Then bullets fly and people die, making for a second half that sheds some of the comedy for a shared common purpose, a desire to finally fight back. As Basil puts it after joining the commandos: “There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”

What to make of this farce-like comedy that finally, abruptly takes a stand for defending democracy against a very clear threat? That it shows Waugh both at his most fearless and insensitive, finding real humor and depth of character in his mocking stereotypes, not expecting you to be bothered by their sudden annihilation. His investment in his characters is paper-thin, yet there are moments of real passion that communicate the closeness of the ongoing struggle.

This comes out in long internal monologue by Silk, pining for his Brown Shirt lover now locked up in a Nazi concentration camp. To this point, Waugh had played the gay stuff for laughs, Ambrose romanticizing his thuggish rough-trade boy-toy as something akin to a pug-nosed pastoral faun. But here, just for a moment, he gives Silk a moment of clarity that eludes his straighter friends:

But if, thought Ambrose, I were one of these people, if I were not a cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy, if I were not all that the Nazis mean when they talk about “degenerates,” if I were not a single, sane individual, if I were part of a herd, one of these people, normal and responsible for the welfare of my herd, Gawd strike me pink, thought Ambrose, I wouldn’t sit around discussing what kind of war it was going to be. I’d make it my kind of war. I’d set about killing and stampeding the other herd as fast and as hard as I could.

Child evacuees in Montgomeryshire, 1939. Basil Seal's scam to dump problem children on unsuspecting country squires is the closest thing Put Out More Flags has to a satisfying plot, but it is too thin to sustain the entire novel and is dropped in the last third.
Image from https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/the-evacuation-of-children-during-the-second-world-war/

All in all, Put Out More Flags is a perplexing book. It presents blistering moments of eloquently delivered truth articulating a need for taking the war seriously, and at the same time treats most of the situation with all its heartbreaks and tragedies as a bloody-minded lark. He’s mocking people who care and people who are blasé at the same time.

It seems Waugh’s views about the war shifted every time he sat down to work on his new manuscript. What there is of a story remains episodic, never landing on one emotional or narrative tangent for long.

Ultimately, Put Out More Flags is a frustrating and disappointing book. Fortunately it would not be Waugh’s last word on World War II; nor on London society. But it does cement his tonal shift toward more serious, realistic fiction that would mark the rest of his career.