Blockhead

A Bernard Shaw wartime farce

Augustus Does His Bit by George Bernard Shaw

This is not one of the weigher plays of Bernard Shaw’s, nor is it the funniest. You’re not going to learn anything or even think via this one. Instead, what you get is a classic farce, a farce with a wartime theme. This was written during the First World War, was performed first with the playwright left anonymous, and was presumably enjoyed (in part if not in whole) by servicemen at home on leave.

And they ought to have liked it, for it is about the people who ran their lives, who made all as it was. This is a play about the British upper classes.

Say what you like about modern day Britain: collapsing, failing, decaying. The one thing it does not have any more is an effectual upper class. There are people with degrees from the right universities. There are lawyers and judges and civil servants. These people are the new elite. But what they lack, and it’s one of the reasons they do what they do, is a kind of status, an in-built, inborn sense of superiority. What some might call noblesse oblige, and others might call a bleeding liberty. The new elites are chippy, very chippy; they don’t take their status for granted. One lost job, one falling out over a burning social issue, and you’re gone: banished to the other world of cast-offs and down-and-outs. Life is precarious when you could join the precariat for ever with the sending of a single TikTok.

Shaw did not live in that world. There is no way he could possibly have imagined it. Instead, the War Office, the army: all of these institutions were run, by and large, from antique rooms, by men with old family names. They believed in duty, but for many only because it gave them status. They believed in sacrifice. But mostly of sacrificing others first or at the least in parallel. And they were patriots, believers in the nation; but only if that nation persisted with what they thought of as its wisest and best institution: the habit of keeping them in charge.

These networks of cousins and relations stretched across Westminster into Whitehall, all the way to Aldershot. Via the good schools and the great universities. Producing generation after generation of men who were self-assured but unself-aware. The kinds of men like Lord Augustus Highcastle.

Lord Augustus is sure of himself. He was ever sure of himself, was sure of himself all his life. We find him on the seaside stage. He is out in the middle of nowhere in some seafront resort or some beachside town. There is a military installation out in the harbour, some big guns; and it’s Lord Augustus’s job to keep them protected. He amuses himself by doing his bit for the defence of the area and the nation; he speaks at recruiting rallies. He tries and tries to make spending what remains of your life chewing barbed wire in Flanders seem fun. And anyway, he tells an unappreciative audience, think of the fantastic benefits and pensions your widows will get!

Not a single man volunteers, that night.

His clerk later tells Lord Augustus that the very same line would have worked much better, and produced many more recruits, if he had tried it out on the women of the town and not the men. The men would have found themselves signing up in large numbers, not sure why.

Lord Augustus does not like his clerk. The clerk is lower middle class, the worst class of all. He talks common. He comes from no great family. He is not educated; he is relatively old (this is 1917) at fifty-odd. And he has this terrible habit of complaining. He wants more money, to account for all the rising prices. When he is told to save gas, he says that actually, orders came through just the other day that we are to use gas rather than coal. And when Lord Augustus tries out some of his theories of war and service on him, the clerk won’t have it. He isn’t interested.

And then, a prude in a book for children might say, there enters into the drama A Lady. The clerk, too, is helpless before her. Lord Augustus says he’s busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed by a lady, when the announcement of her seeking an appointment arrives.

The clerk essentially uses Captain Renault’s line from Casablanca to disabuse him: ‘I’ve seen the lady.’

And she arrives, all charm, all a-baustle, to tell Lord Augustus that something very strange is happening. Relatives are funny things; she and Lord Augustus agree. He has relations all over the British government and in the German government, too.

And I also suffer from the same affliction, the lady says. There is a German spy, she tells him, in the area. And she is my relation. I warn you that she is a canny one; that she will pick up on your faults, your failings; she will exploit weaknesses, understand errors of judgement. And she has been tasked to steal the plans of the coastal guns, plans that Lord Augustus eagerly reminds her he has in his possession. Plans that he assures her he will take the greatest possible care to protect from harm.