Put Out More Flags - Diary - Brief Article

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2001 by Charlotte Hays

AS ENGLAND PREPARED to go to war against Hi tier, Guy Crouchback, the hero of Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms, felt confusion melt away: "When Prague fell, he knew that war was inevitable," Waugh wrote. "He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become dear. The enemy was in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms."

Waugh is probably not the obvious writer to turn to in a rime such as the present, but I do. Waugh didn't like modernity--that is, the world America has created--and he was a terrible snob. But Waugh did capture the romance of the history of the West--including its valorous exploits in battle--which we must regain if we are to wage war against an enemy who loathes the West's achievements.

War often comes on the heels of a trivial age--as it did for Guy Crouchback and for all Waugh's sparkling youth and as it now does for us. After the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, after U.S. embassies were blown up, and the USS Cole was hit by terrorists, instead of fighting back in a lethal way, we huffed and puffed. Some went so far as to sympathize with the enemy, insisting that "conditions" (bin Laden's billionaire background?) had created a "cycle of violence" that we dare nor perpetuate. Our complacency was presaged in Men at Arms.

Predicting that Hitler would nor prove a genuine threat to England, Guy Crouchback's brother-in-law, Arthur Box-Bender, a Member of Parliament, sniffed, "No one in his senses would try to break either the Maginor or the Siegfried Line. The Germans are short of almost every industrial essential. As soon as they realize Mr. Hider's bluff has been called, we shan't hear much more of Mr. Hitler."

Our enemy, of course, is an evil creature, who inhabits caves and abhors modernity, which, indeed, he simply refuses to recognize. He refers to secular Westerners as "crusaders." He is stuck in the Middle Ages, when Christians clashed with Muslims led by the glamorous and chivalrous Saladin. (Osama bin Laden, you're no Saladin!) Still, as Mr. Hitler conferred clarity on Guy Crouchback, Mr. bin Laden on Sept. 11 conferred dairy on us. We awoke from a decade of astonishing shallowness to realize that there are enemies far more baleful than--say--the tobacco companies.

We realized, too, that there are things worth dying for--indeed, as the columnist George Will pointed out, at the prayer service at the National Cathedral, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was sung in its original, unbowdierized version. ("As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" had become in our decadent age "let us live to make men free.")

We as a society had come to regard war as always immoral--but now we know better. Ordinary people, and even many pundits, usually the last to know, grasp this old new truth instinctively and bravely. Some, however, remain mired in the frivolous world we inhabited before Sept. 11.

A dotty female Episcopal priest, for example, suggested "bombing Afghanistan with butter" and other western goodies. 'While a Franciscan priest gave his life to administer the last rites to a fireman dying in the shadow of the World Trade Center towers, Father William Byron, S.J., in an article on the attack in the Washington archdiocese's Catholic Standard, fretted about the nature of American society. Christianity had flourished in the catacombs (not capitalistic!), he noted, and worried if it's possible to be Christian in slryscrapers. Oops!

But most people have responded in a way that makes one proud to be an American. Commentators, perhaps the only segment of society still mired in the Vietnam quagmire, wonder if we will be willing to endure casualties--we've already had more than 5,000 casualties, as those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks should be called in preference to the word "victims"--but the American people know that we must. (If we forget that we must be willing to sustain casualties, George Will warns, bin Laden will be only too happy to remind us.)

In the epigraph to Put Out More Flags, another novel set at the outbreak of World War II, Waugh quoted from Chang Ch'ao: "A little injustice in the heart can be drowned by wine, but a great injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword."