Evelyn Waugh and Blimp

Extract

Sitting in club rooms, with cigars and brandy at call, there ‘is a stage in the evening when old colonels talking to younger officers will glance through the day’s news, saying: ‘World’s over-populated, you know. Needs a blood-bath now and then. Terrible things, wars, but they have to be. We’ve had our go. Be your turn soon.’ If the secret thus handed down from generation to generation is a professional one, at least it has the merits of being an open one; and, easy as such a secret is to scoff at, there is still a good deal of sense in it—even though that sense may be considered by some to be a primitive kind of horse- sense. For it conjures up a picture of the world such as it might be today had the Incarnation not yet occurred and, viewed from different angles, this is a theme which has interested Mr Evelyn Waugh for the past two decades.

In Vile Bodies (1930) one comes across its first statement:

‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I’ll be damned’, he said defiantly, ‘if they shall have a war without consulting me. What’s a Cabinet for if there’s not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for, anyway?’

‘That’s the whole point. No one talks about it, and no one wants it. No one talks about it because no one wants it. They’re all afraid to breathe a word about it.’