The british officer says you should have thought that a pack of british boys would have been able to put up a better show than that what does this mean in lord of the flies?

Answer 1

This remark- made at the end of the novel- comes from an American officer, not a British one, when he leads a patrol of marines onto the beach to rescue the stranded schoolboys.

His remark is aimed at contrasting the high reputation that English public schoolboys have for maturity, level-headedness, and generally exemplary standards of behaviour, with the savage, bestial state that the lads have descended into during their time on the island. When Lord of the Flies was written, in the mid-1950s, Britain was still an Empirical power. Although it was declining on the international stage from the height of it's power in the early 20th Century, it still carried at least as much (if not more) influence in world politics and culture as the USA. The 'model Englishman' was the ideal standard to which the British establishment believed all other nations and civilisations should aspire, and the state of a nation's development was measured by the extent to which it was believed it had embraced English values, manners and behaviour. And the English public schoolboy was seen to be the 'model Englishman' of tomorrow- he was supposed to live up to all the expectations invested in him by the 'mother country', embodying decency, civilization and fair play.

Fifty years ago, even new Superpowers such as the USA looked up to the English reputation for decency, and expected this to be reflected even in the behaviour of it's young adolescent gentlemen. The American officer is shocked to see such lads- who have a reputation around the world for being the epitomy of the civilised young man- reduced to the state of tribal African savages, possessed by the primeval bestiality that lies at the very opposite of the scale.

The rescue of the surviving English schoolboys by a detachment of US marines is a metaphor for what was then Britain's declining dominance of the world stage in contrast to the rise of a renewed, confident USA as a global superpower. The exhausted, terrified, filthy boys, wearing rags and broken spectacles and fighting amongst themselves, symbolise the shattered state of postwar Britain being rescued by the clean, disciplined, advanced new United States.

(N.B. it is worth remembering though, that whatever symbolism was intended in Lord Of The Flies, in reality much of America's new technologies were first developed by the British! But I digress....)