Waugh spent the last months of 1939 after war was declared writing Work Suspended, digging up his carefully landscaped garden for vegetables, and preparing Piers Court for the influx of evacuees. In desperation as his attempts at getting called up failed, he opened negotiations to launch a literary magazine, to be called Duration. The next day, Laura went into labour, Waugh abandoned his novel to join her, and Auberon was born. The same week Waugh was summoned for a successful interview with the Marines. Celebrating that evening at his club, he learned that ‘my idea for a magazine had already been anticipated by the rump of the left wing under Connolly,’ got drunk, and was sick in the small hours. ‘The subsequent hangover removed all illusions of heroism’ (D 450–1, 17–24 November 1939).

Yet Waugh did go into war with high hopes of heroism. In August his first instinct had been to enlist as a private soldier (D 438). In what Waugh nicknamed POMF, one of his two alter egos, Alastair, has the same impulse, as his wife Sonia revealingly recalls:

Waugh joined the Marines at Chatham Barracks in December 1939. The early months of training find him ‘enjoying the war top hole’ under an irresistible Brigade Commander with ‘teeth like a stoat, ears like a faun, eyes alight like a child playing pirates.’ Waugh often sounds like a schoolboy too, fretting for ‘decent raids’ in London, dismayed by failure, swanking about the tiny triumphs of training, like Alastair after his first day of manoeuvres boasting to Sonia: ‘I put down smoke […] The whole advance was held up till I put down smoke.’ ‘Darling, you are clever.’