Sword of Honor

Waugh, is an acquired taste. The Trilogy, now just published as one book was originally made up of the following "Men at Arms" -- here we are introduced to Mr. Guy Crouchback, the Catholic survivor of an old, disgarded, and increasing impoverished patrician family in England at the beginning of the War. Guy is not so much interested in getting into the war as he is in finding his own place in this war. He's 35 and too old for the line regiments and not of the right "stuff" for the special guards regiments. By a fluke he ends up in the mythical Royal Halbedier Regt. as an officer cadet. In his entire time here we find the class system transposed more or less intact into the army, where incompetence and pure idiosyncracy is rewarded and individuality discouraged. We find a gallery of both lovable and boffish rouges. We find the classic British Army hard-man psychopath Brigadier Hook. And we find the taudry and often tragic relationships shaped by a system they may be able to hide from, but from whose moral sanction they cannot escape. Guy gets selected for the ill-fated Dakar expedition. He makes a name of himself by secretly raiding the coast held by the Free French. He does so under Brig. Hook's mischevious order. After he and Hook return to be court-martialed, Guy finds himself once again a perrenial outsider. (Also please note the absolutely hillarious chapter where Guy attempts to seduce his divorced wife). "Officers And Gentleman" Guy is back and he and Brig Hook are promoted for audicity "in the face of the enemy" -- by Churchill and posted to a new Commando type group training on a remote island in Scotland. Guy and friends get into more trouble than training and find themselves all geared up for Crete and land just long enough to find out that they are defeated and need to be withdrawn. "Unconditional Surrender" Where Guy is landed to support the Tito's partisans. He finds out that people he is supporting, appear to be little different in their extreme methods than the fascists he is trying to overthrow. Through all the books there is the slow pervading rot of the English class system fighting it last battle against fascism. A battle that must be faught, but one whose hard cynical questions Guy is already asking himself -- what about Stalin... he appears to be a frightful rotter, killing people because of their class, constantly getting screwed the class system, Guy advances by luck, and incomptence seems to reign and strategy made on according to what comes to mind in the heads of the brass hats... All the while his Catholicism is also hanging on for dear life... ready to take a plunge off the cliff of aetheism. Since Waugh actually faught in most of the campaigns he describes, we need to take him seriously. But he is ultimately not a more accurate source for the events of WWII, but rather a anti-hero, cynical view of the events -- more a counter balance to the guts and glory stereotype, but not necessarily more correct o

Guy Crouchback is almost saintly. He is Catholic, patriotic, and selfless. When World War II comes along he is eager to serve his country and to be thrown into the caldron of war. But, by his own admission, he is not "simpatico" and he always seems to be the square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Perhaps his military career parallels that of the author, Evelyn Waugh. There is of course no place for Guy in the British Army where his hard work and dedication are little rewarded and his war experiences are spotted with malfortune, little of which is of his own making. Guy "blots his copy book" early on and ends up being suspected of spying for the Italians. Waugh dots this novel with a cast of clownish characters and comic adventures in which Guy sadly participates. Waugh's irreverent attitude toward World War II has probably made this novel less popular than it should have been. For example, at the opening of the war, Crouchback wonders why England, in the face of simultaneous invasions of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, chose to go to war with one and not the other. At another point, Guy muses that "he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue." In the best Waughian tradition, he does a hatchet job on the much-celebrated Yugoslav resistance movement of Marshall Tito. Waugh, oddly enough, has also made the interesting comment that he wrote the "obituary" of the Roman Catholic Church in England with this novel. I take him at his word although perhaps I can't fully appreciate the Catholic subtleties of the novel. Waugh originally published this novel in three volumes between 1952 and 1962. He then published the three volumes in one, omitting "tedious" passages. One of the tedious passages he omitted was, to me, the most memorable of the book -- the tale of children evacuated from London at the beginning of the war and thrust, with hilarious consequences, upon the country gentry for caretaking. So, you might read the novels -- Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle -- separately as well as together. Beyond thrillers, World War II doesn't seem to have inspired a lot of good novels. Waugh's comic, sad, and cynical novel is one of the best. Smallchief

Guy Crouchback is almost saintly. He is Catholic, patriotic, and selfless. When World War II comes along he is eager to serve his country and to be thrown into the caldron of war. But, by his own admission, he is not "simpatico" and he always seems to be the square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Perhaps his military career parallels that of the author, Evelyn Waugh. There is of course no place for Guy in the British Army where his hard work and dedication are little rewarded and his war experiences are spotted with malfortune, little of which is of his own making. Guy "blots his copy book" early on and ends up being suspected of spying for the Italians. Waugh dots this novel with a cast of clownish characters and comic adventures in which Guy sadly participates. Waugh's irreverent attitude toward World War II has probably made this novel less popular than it should have been. For example, at the opening of the war, Crouchback wonders why England, in the face of simultaneous invasions of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, chose to go to war with one and not the other. At another point, Guy muses that "he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue." In the best Waughian tradition, he does a hatchet job on the much-celebrated Yugoslav resistance movement of Marshall Tito. Waugh, oddly enough, has also made the interesting comment that he wrote the "obituary" of the Roman Catholic Church in England with this novel. I take him at his word although perhaps I can't fully appreciate the Catholic subtleties of the novel. Waugh originally published this novel in three volumes between 1952 and 1962. He then published the three volumes in one, omitting "tedious" passages. One of the tedious passages he omitted was, to me, the most memorable of the book -- the tale of children evacuated from London at the beginning of the war and thrust, with hilarious consequences, upon the country gentry for caretaking. So, you might read the novels -- Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle -- separately as well as together. Beyond thrillers, World War II seems to have produced few good novels. Waugh's comic, sad, and cynical novel is one of the best. Smallchief

Though "Brideshead Revisited" may be his best known work, nothing conveys Waugh's sense of the world better than "The Sword of Honour" trilogy. His sacramental view of earthly reality is best expressed in a memorable exchange between Guy Crouchback, the book's protagonist, and an obviously overwhelmed Anglican minister. "... Do you agree," [Guy] asked earnestly, "that the Supernatural Order is not something added to the Natural Order, like music or painting, to make everday life more tolerable? It is everyday life. The supernatural is real; what we call 'real' is a mere shadow, a passing fancy. Don't you agree, Padre?" "Up to a point." [said the Padre] Sadly, Alfred A. Knopf's Everyman's Library, a collection of books intended to preserve and popularize the classics of modern literature, isn't up to the task. The binding is stiff and cheap, and the gold embossed lettering on the cover literally disintegrates in your hands. I bought this book hoping it would last a lifetime, but I'll be lucky if it survives the coming year. Read Waugh for the tonic that he is, but avoid the Everyman's Library like the publishing plague that it is.

When these books came out a number of reviewers thought that Waugh had lost his touch. Perhaps the atmosphere of the swinging sixties did not lend to itself a real understanding of the greatness of this work. In my opinion this work represents one of Waugh's major works. While it does not cover every aspect of World War Two (Proust did not feel the need to fight out every battle of World War One either), it does provide a kind of summing up of the state of Britain and what happened to former ruling class, a body that provoked feelings of great affinity from Waugh, even though he was a product of the upper middle class. The key to understanding Waugh, not just this book, but also all of the others is his distrust of the 20th century. He came of age during the 1920s and biographers have noted an early fascination with the pre-Raphaelites. Although this artistic brotherhood focused on life in the pre-industrial age Waugh the satirist brought his powers to bear on the post World War I modern world its mores and hypocrasies. World War Two brought high taxes and democracy to this admired world of the British gentry and Waugh correctly chronicles this in his summary of the war in the trilogy. The book is also a wonderful social satire drawing portraits of many of Waugh's own circle including Diana Mosley (With the fascist sympathies air brushed out here) Cyril Connolly and others. He marks the fall of the aristocratic officer and the rise of the "Trimmers" of the world whose heroism is more a result of luck and press puffing than genuine achievement. The turning point in the book is the Crete campaign. Here British high born leadership collapses finally. Waugh sees this military failure coupled with the subsequent alliance with Bolshevik Russia to be one of the failures of the war. The so-called "Stalingrad sword" which appears as a character in its own right is symbollic of the passing away of the former way of life. It is not surprising that Waugh kills off the saintly Mr. Couchback (the hero's father) at this point in the book to provide a last hurrah for the old Catholic landed gentry. The book is replete with a full gallary of comic characters. My favorite Apthorpe is unfortunately killed off in the first novel. To detail the reasons would be to deprive future of readers of the genuine pleasure in encountering him in the novels. However despite this absence in the two subsequent volumes, there are plenty to keep one amused. My second favorite of Virginia Troy, who is the ex-wife of our hero, Guy Crouchback. It is entertaining to watch this very worldly woman make her way through war-time Britain. There is Ludovic, the aspirant writer, enlisted man and probably the personification of the future post-war world with his trite novel "The Death Wish." Finally there is Trimmer, a former barber who becomes a hero because Britain needed one who was working class (at least in the opinion of HO HQ). This is a major work by Waugh an