Put Out More Flags

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But the owners of the country piles must now 'do their bit' and either have the local militia camped on their lawns with their sprawling tented villages, and the officers made welcome in their drawing rooms, or take in children evacuees despatched from Birmingham and billeted upon them by the local authorities. Meanwhile their husbands seek to use the wheels of patronage and secure an easy wartime occupation. space, three-dimensional war, global war, war eternal--in brief, every kind of war except the war to defeat the enemy. Put Out More Flags is classic Evelyn Waugh in terms of his signature satire and farce among the social elite—which he does so well. Furthermore, fans of Waugh’s earlier novels will rejoice to know they will meet up again with one or two characters from those earlier works. In his own preface to this book, Waugh admits of those characters, “I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last heard of them…” For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words

All efforts were made toward letting the original jokes do the work and pulling any extra punches, or punch lines, that might have distracted. The result was a sluggish pace and an air of 1939-45 gloom, as faded as it was visually precise…[I]n this careful production, too many of the lines were spoken with an awed and therefore misplaced reverence.

by Evelyn Waugh

Dedicated to Randolph Churchill, who found a service commission for Waugh during the Second World War, the story is set in the first year of the war. In Ambrose Silk, Waugh does something quite astonishing for him: he creates a detailed, sympathetic understanding picture of what would in his earlier (and perhaps his later) books, have been merely a figure of fun—a homosexual, half-Jewish intellectual who hangs out with the odds and sods of London bohemianism. But there is nothing merely funny about Waugh's portrait of Silk, who is immediately established as a first-rate writer and the unhappy victim of his sexual conflicts:

With Bertie hoping to control petrol in the Shetlands, with Algernon off to Syria on a secret mission, with poor John waiting for his commission, the whole thing sounds like a war for the very best people. And with the intellectuals prating Many years ago, I started a little handbook which I kept near me when I was reading, in which I added words that I read that I previously didn't know the definition to (or at least not well). This has lain dormant for a while, but this book caused it to be reactivated. A couple of examples:

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Basil does well out of the war, up to a point: he unhesitatingly takes advantage of his sister's latently incestuous attraction for him—the scenes in which this attraction surfaces, played out in chilling nursery talk between Basil and Barbara, are among the best expositions of sibling love I've ever encountered—makes money and finds a temporary mistress out of a scheme in which he must find a country billet for three appallingly uncouth évacué children, and earns himself a reputation as a spy-catcher for the War Office by turning in poor Ambrose, now the editor of a literary magazine, as a crypto-fascist. hardest when the chips are down and keep the peace the longest in the intervals are those who know that the only thing worse than war is a lost war.

IMDB recently updated the archival information in its database relating to two little-known BBC TV adaptations of Waugh’s works from 1970. These are Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags. Both were 90-minute productions on BBC2, but some archival information is still incomplete. Through his unsavory vision, we see how England rapidly converted from the drawing-room to the battlefield in the course of a year. Basil resists finding a war job until it's absolutely necessary, and watches his friends and acquaintances join forces with the war effort. Waugh wrote this book in real time; it came out in 1942, so the voices and attitudes are those of the upper class that were part of his daily round. We see the language change from society shorthand to military doublespeak, the outfits from tea gowns to fatigues, and the attitudes from conversation to action. larger part of the action turns: Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal, his sister, Barbara, and his mistress, Angela Lyne.out of a war is the opportunity to solve your problems without an enemy pointing a pistol at your head. You must fight for that without illusion, lest you fall prey to the post-war cynicism that ruins everything. The people who fight the