Indecent behaviour during war - 15 February 1991

Last month when we had the final, the Cup Final so to speak, of the American football season, the winners, the New York Giants, did not, as the winners always do, pour champagne over each other's heads. They skipped this traditional celebration out of respect for the troops in the Gulf. Many of whom must have been watching it out there on television and were possibly disappointed not to see the usual triumphant ritual.

Still, the Giants' restraint is surely admirable. They solved for themselves a problem that comes up to challenge practically every public figure these days. Movie stars, athletes, charity organisers, politicians and their families, not least royals, as we've been reading.

Put simply, what sort of public behaviour is unbecoming – I like the Latin word, indecent – when you have armies of the young putting their life on the line for you in a war. I thought we were going to have a sublime example of indecent behaviour when I read, a week ago, that an American magazine was about to launch its British edition with a big party in London. This expectation was fed by the following facts. The magazine is a fashion magazine in the complete sense. It keeps tabs on the smartest people and tells you not only what to wear but what and where to eat, what to read, what to think. And you'd better not miss a copy because next month there'll be other dishes, clothes, plays, thoughts. Now, why I feared the worst from the London party was the fact that the New York editor is an English woman and she declared in a television interview, only a month or so ago, that every successful magazine should contain in every issue one feature in thoroughly bad taste. Don't ask me what this mystifying thought is meant to convey.

Anyway, if this lady were going to be in charge of the London party and having in mind the daily, nightly ordeals of the troops in the Gulf, not to mention the bombed out citizens of Baghdad and Basra, the possibilities for a tasteless party, put on at enormous expense, are plainly horrendous. However, the publishers chickened out at the last minute. They said that "a major bash", sounds like the military aide to Colonel Blimp, "a major bash was thought to be inappropriate when there are much more serious things going on".

I'm sure the question "how not to behave" is touching almost everyone today. The first time it came up with me was with an old friend, a 60-year-old spinster, comfortably off, who has lashings of nephews and nieces and grand-nephews and grand-nieces scattered around the east coast, and sees them all at Christmas time. But, after that, in the New Year, she usually goes off for a holiday in the Bahamas or the Caribbean. This time, she was to leave on 17 January, but promptly on the morning of 16th, after the Iraqi deadline had expired and, without a second thought, she cancelled her trip. No ifs, buts or perhapses, she then, I know, calculated the cost of her entire trip and dispatched a cheque for the approximate amount to the American Red Cross. This was done quietly, crisply, without fuss or pride. She's a breezy, funny lady who never mentions that, although she is not a Mormon and so required by her faith, she tithes. That's to say she sets aside at least 10% of her annual income for charity.

Well, if we all behaved like that I should think we could take off on holiday with a good conscience which, of course, would be a contradiction of her original impulse. As a practical matter, if you can reduce a moral principle to a practical matter. I suppose we ought to ask, in what way does my behaviour help, or hinder the troops? I remember putting this up to a friend during the Second World War, an Englishman working in New York, for the British War Information Office. He was long past military age, had, in fact, gone over three years through the trenches in the First War and come out miraculously intact. He'd been sent out to New York to take charge here in the autumn of 1939. Very soon after Britain declared war.

The following spring was, of course, the pit of despair. I suppose even more for Englishmen overseas than for those riding out in Britain itself the dreadful retreat of the allied armies to the Channel ports. My friend would have done far better to beg to go home and take up residence in Dover. In New York, he was in an emotional stew, desperate, from day to day, to discover some useful form of penance for not being with the troops in France. The first thing he did was to stop smoking. He found it hard to keep up this abstinence and since he lived in the Waldorf hotel, I suggested he would be helping the troops just as much if he moved to a modest bed-sitter and smoked himself stupid.

When the British and French armies started to fall back, he got, every day, the early edition of the New York Post, discovered the number of miles they'd retreated, plotted the same on a map of Manhattan and then, that evening, walked the identical distance. On the evening before the final collapse at the port of Dunkirk, he walked something like 19 miles up to Harlem, across to the George Washington Bridge, down the west side to the Battery and back up to the 50s and his cot in the Waldorf. After the evacuation from Dunkirk and the French surrender, he couldn't think of any other sacrifice or hardship that would parallel the humiliation of the troops. He fell into a depression from which, as the years went by, America came in, the Normandy invasion, the Rhine crossed, he perked up a notch with every lift in the allied fortunes till, I recall, in the euphoria of VE Day, I reminded him of his monkish routine during the Dunkirk days. He could laugh at it then, but he still said, "I felt I owed it to them".

Of course, what I'm talking about is the instinct of people not to flaunt their pleasures, their desire to have a good time. For the vast majority of the population, the populations here, in Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, there's no problem of reigning in the impulse towards showing off your wealth, towards what we used to call conspicuous consumption, simply because most people don't have the means. But everybody loves a party and it will take some time, as it did in the Second War, before we become hard heated or perhaps sensible enough to appreciate that wearing a hair shirt on the home front does not in any way help the men, and now the women, sweating it out or dying in the desert.

This scruple was never a problem here with the Vietnamese war because it did not have a firm, dramatic beginning. Not only was there no declaration – one of the insidious things about Vietnam which a whole generation of young Americans has never forgiven President Lyndon Johnson, though Kennedy started it, was the way the war crept up on the nation, like a wisp of cloud on the horizon. Then a gradual greying over. Then a shower. By the time the thunder came, there was a full-blown draft and Kennedy's few thousand technical advisors had turned into half a million American men.

So I don't remember that we ever stopped and at a certain time said "we're going into a big war". All the ordinary pursuits and pleasures of peace time were followed without squeamish thought about what we ought or ought not to be doing. Whether in some tasteless way we were slighting the men at the front. We could say men without liberation-qualms in those days since women were not allowed in combat.

But this is a war like none other. In the American experience, I mean the experience of living people. Unless you can go back to April 1917 which is what my few living contemporaries here do go back to when we talk about it, the day President Wilson went before Congress to ask and get a declaration of war against the central powers, mainly Germany and Austria. But then there was a pretty quick conscription and everybody was in it.

Today, the armed forces remain voluntary forces and I believe I pointed out earlier that perhaps a strong reason why the protest marches and rallies have been a congregation of all ages, not as with Vietnam mainly the young, is because there is no draft to fear. But I did discover the other day that on many campuses across the country students are already beginning to plot their strategies of evasion in case of a draft. Vietnam saw a large exodus of American students to Canada and an even larger body of students who at the end of their college careers were suddenly overcome by a passion for research in graduate schools. Maybe they seeded the continuing bumper crop of PhD theses on everything that are not worth the paper they are word-processed on.

It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to see what escape routes will be invented if it comes to a draft this time. For Canada is no longer a sanctuary. Canada, a point rarely if ever made in American news reporting, has its thousands of troops right there in the desert. But, for the rest of us who, for one reason or another – age, religious persuasion, flat feet – are beyond the call, there remains the question of how much carefree behaviour we ought to indulge?

The explanation of my old Englishman with his nightly, enormous walks. "I felt I owed it to them" – is certainly illogical, unhelpful, fatuous. Nevertheless, it was the thought and the act of a decent man.

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