The Great Bore War

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS--Evelyn Waugh --Little, Brown ($2.50). "I am afraid," writes Evelyn Waugh, in a dedicatory letter to his friend Major Randolph Churchill, "that these pages may not be altogether acceptable to your ardent and sanguine nature. They deal, mostly, with a race of ghosts ... in that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time 'the Great Bore War.' "

They are ghosts indeed, weird and touching ones. They have walked the earth ever since Waugh's famed Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, symbols of a hypercivilized, degenerate England. Put Out More Flags --perhaps their last appearance--is Waugh's peculiar genius at its best. In 300 swift, compact pages he constructs not only the funniest but also the most cruelly searching image to date of England in her latest fateful moment of history.

Waugh's hero ghost is ratlike, inexorably likable Basil Seal, the flower of British adventurousness degraded to magenta.* War draws him and his fellow ghosts into one of those ornamental tourniquet-and-candy- box knots which only Waugh knows how to tie. But Waugh's dross and gloss should deceive nobody for long; he has become one of the most deadly serious moralists of his generation. Every one of his novels had its masked importance. History helps make Put Out More Flags his most important book so far.

September Sunday. On the morning the war began, "the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal." His mother, old Lady Seal ("I never made a fuss of that vulgar man von Ribben-trop"), set her old friend Sir Joseph Mainwaring to work negotiating her scapegrace son "a commission in a decent regiment." Basil's mistress and his sister also thought of him, in terms of Rupert Brooke, of Old Bill, of the Unknown Soldier. But this 36-year-old problem child "fell short and wide," on that fateful morning, "of all these ideals." Basil woke up with a hangover in the studio of a Marxist painter named Poppet Green; and tried to explain his assertion of the night before that there would be no war. It cheered him when Poppet, "a remarkably silly girl," tore whimpering for the cellarage at the sound of the first sirens, and he was quite himself again when he squelched a green, bossy warden with his mythical status as "M. I. 9" and added the advice: "You may be breathing arsenical smoke at this moment. Watch your urine in a couple of days' time." "Coo," said the warden, scared green. After the All Clear, Poppet's Stalinoid friends gathered in her studio: "D'you know, I found myself actually praying." "I say, did you? That's bad." "Better see Erchman again." "Unless he's in a concentration camp." "We shall all be in concentration camps." A suspected Trotskyist interrupted discussion of the "great poets" Parsnip and Pimpernell, who were safe in the U.S.: "It's just sheer escapism," she said. There was a silence, "like the cry of 'Cheat' in a card room." "That's a foul thing to say, Julia," said one of the comrades. Later on, with his Scott-Fitzgeraldish friends the Trumpingtons, Basil strolled past Buckingham Palace to see whether the sentries would salute Peter Pastmas-ter's uniform. They did. "I know what I want," Basil told his friends. "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war." War Work.

It wasn't that easy. The Ministry of Information, deaf to his hot scheme for the annexation of Liberia, passed him from desk to desk. As for military service, Lady Seal explained: "The Army is very full just at present.

Things will be much easier when we have had some casualties." Even after the first great, chastening shake-up in the Ministry of Information ("Sir Philip Hesketh-Smith-ers went to the Folk-dancing Department; Mr.

Pauling went to Woodcuts and Weaving; Mr. Digby-Smith was given the Arctic Circle; Mr. Bentley . . . directed a film about postmen . . ." etc.), there was no place for Basil. At length heaven sent him a trio of evacuees known as The Connol-lies.

The Connollies were a diamondlike quintessence of the pressures of centuries of slum life. They were Doris, a pig-eyed nymphomaniac; Micky, "a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul," who developed a taste for whittling off the heads of domestic animals; and little Marlene, who liked to finish off the dogs' supper plates and who promptly restored all she ate all over the floors. There they stood, "one leering, one lowering, and one drooling," a frightful triptych, the terror of the countryside. Basil found inspired use for them. Assuming power as billeting officer, he visited them upon another British quintessence: the middleaged, music-loving, rock-gardening, genteel, post-Pre-Raphaelite people who made up the Garden Party Only list in sister Barbara's address book. On these Basil cleaned up in one heart-squeezing blackmail after another, for they were willing to pay with their own souls for the Connollies' removal. When he decided to return to London, he sold out his business, plus invaluable good will, to a billeting officer with as sharp an eye for trade as his own.

Back in London, the Diaghilevian Esthete Ambrose Silk was about to publish Ivory Tower, a magazine arrogantly devoted to the arts alone and written by him alone, featuring a manifesto in the old avant-garde style of the '20s which insulted everybody and thing in sight. Poppet Green was "painting away like a mowing machine . . . bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass, seaweed, shells and funguses."

This time Basil was ruthless. He got into the Ministry of Information and offered to betray "some very dangerous Communists" he knew, such as "the woman Green." Crooked Colonel Plum made him a second lieutenant ("There's a lot to be said for a uniform . ... best possible disguise for a man of intelligence") and said, "Catch a Fascist for me and I'll think about making you a Captain of Marines." Ambrose's magazine and Poppet's Marxed-up reflex to it furnished Basil with his Fascist. His betrayal of Ambrose is a piece of murderous satire which should at once warm and chill the hearts of hundreds of innocent, scared, suspected, non-fifth-columnists. It also helps bring the book into line for its surprising epilogue. France fallen, and Sir Joseph Mainwaring blathering along about the war's having entered "a new and more glorious phase," Waugh girds up his ghosts in their brave, schoolboyish excitement over the newborn Commandos (he belongs him-self): ". . .

Special knives and tommy-guns and knuckle-dusters ; they wear rope-soled shoes . . . they carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with," Alastair Trumpington breathlessly tells his pregnant wife. "D'you mind very much if I accept?" "No, darling, I couldn't keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn't. I see that." It is not quite easy to believe in the Basil of the epilogue who says, "There's only one serious occupation for a chap now, that's killing Germans," good as he might well be at the job. But Waugh's tag line brings every page of the book into razor focus.

"There's a new spirit abroad," beams that infallible master of misinformation, Sir Joseph, "I see it on every side." "And poor booby," Waugh concludes, "he was bang right."

*The pigmentary L.C.D. of floral degeneration.

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