The Falklands crisis blew up weirdly—out of nowhere, it seemed, or out of another century. It was a little too dangerous to remain as diverting as it seemed at first. Still, people mentioned The Mouse That Roared. The sheer oddness of it jarred the imagination. Just as the late 20th century was elaborating new anxieties about nuclear war, its gaze flicking distractedly over the future, abruptly the 19th century came barging into the room: a plumed, anachronistic production of outraged empire in its panoply and high rhetoric. The British fleet steamed out of Portsmouth. To relieve Gordon at Khartoum? To lift the siege of Lucknow? The British were vividly time traveling. The ministers of the ex-empire took a bracing, almost archaically principled stand—a position that itself seemed an exercise in nostalgia: quaint, perhaps, but admirable. Honor was mentioned. The imperial ships set sail like positrons on an expedition into reverse time.
The conflict over the Falklands is a moment dislodged from its natural home in the late 19th century—a period piece. It has played tricks with the world's expectations about time and timing, about history and how long it should take.
Everyone has an internal sense of history's motions. What is the appropriate time frame for a war, for example? In an earlier age, a pair of countries tenaciously aggrieved could spend 100 years at it. But that is exceptional—war as a kind of habit. Human memory is usually too short for that. War after all requires a certain amount of concentration.
In the late 20th century, war has Dopplered up to the opposite extreme. Today the serious part of a global war might last no longer than several passionate kisses. That is why some bystanders witnessing the war of the Falklands find themselves almost charmed by its stately pace, its long preliminaries—the fleet steaming off from England as the Prime Minister quotes Queen Victoria; the weeks at sea as the foreign offices indulge in truculent communiqués and atavistic displays of national plumage. (The long interval between the patriotic eruption and the moment of actual contact also opens up room for negotiation.) A world apocalyptically armed has absorbed the notion that there will not be much safe territory in wars of the future: the war will fall out of the sky one afternoon and land on J.C. Penney's. But in the Falklands, we have a war—if it came to that—that would presumably be conducted in what used to be the great colonial Elsewhere, the distant and exotic battlefield that soldiers sail away to. It would be a regressive war fought for the most part with means that seem almost primitive—ships at sea, for example, and marines.
The earth supposedly keeps one general clock and calendar as it twirls in a universe precisely machined. The minute pulses of quartz vibrating on the wrist imitate the clockwork of the planets. We stripe the globe with time zones. Time is the most predictable of abstractions, a one-directional flow that carries the universe along with its impartial and inexorable wave. The discovery of measurable time is one of the early signs of civilization, like literacy and cosmetics. Time may be mysterious, but it also possesses an admirable objective purity, a sort of narrative genius, like Tolstoy.