In 1946, at the advanced age of forty-three, Waugh pessimistically reckoned: ‘I have two shots in my locker left. My war novel and my autobiography. I suppose they will see me out.’ (L 238) Then Helena intervened, and unexpectedly took four more years to complete.

At long last, in June 1951, Waugh wrote to Laura, ‘Yesterday I spent reading all my war diaries & recapturing the atmosphere of those days. Today I began writing & it came easy.’ (L 351) Not so easy, though. Within days he discovered that his new method of uninterrupted composition didn't suit him – ‘I hate leaving a trail of unfinished shabby work behind me’ – and reverted to his old practice, perfecting each page before moving on. Even then, his letters show growing discontent. The novel in progress is ‘unreadable & endless. Nothing but tippling in officers’ messes and drilling on barrack squares. No demon sex. No blood or thunder.’ ‘A great bore.’ ‘A book in poor taste, mostly about wcs and very very dull.’ It is ‘slogging, inelegant, the first volume of four or five, which won't show any shape until the end.’ When the proofs finally arrived in May 1952 he dismissed it simply as ‘my fiasco’.

There were obvious difficulties. In Put Out More Flags Waugh had already given a brilliant, panoptic image of England during the Phoney War. The fact that many of its highly individualized characters were drawn from his earlier novels innocently appeared to confirm their reality. They had pasts of their own. The novel further benefited from Waugh's military training – both as a soldier who lived at close quarters with men of all ranks, and as an Intelligence Officer who, like Guy in Men at Arms, ‘read his map easily and had a good eye for country’. POMF's social range was thus unusually wide for Waugh, while the rural terrains surveyed by the marauding Basil were evoked with a military tactician's precision. Moreover, for its immediate contemporaries the novel recognizably recreated familiar recent realities – the social upheavals just brought by slum evacuees like the Connolly children and wartime profiteers like Basil; the fatuities of the Ministry of Information; the spy-panic that drove Ambrose to Ireland.