Sword of Honour

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For the Australian TV Miniseries, see Sword of Honour (Australian TV)

The Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh is his look at the Second World War. It consists of three novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961, published as The End of the Battle in the U.S.), which loosely parallel his war time experiences. Waugh received the 1952 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Men at Arms.

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[edit] Plot summary

The protagonist is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic English Catholic family. Guy has spent his thirties at the family villa in Italy shunning the world after the failure of his marriage and has decided to return to England at the very beginning of the Second World War, in the belief that the creeping evils of modernity, gradually apparent in the Soviet Union and the Nazis, have become all too clearly displayed as a real and embodied enemy.

He attempts to join the Army, finally succeeding with the (fictitious) Royal Corps of Halberdiers, an old but not too fashionable regiment. He trains as an officer and is posted to various centres around Britain. One of the themes is recurring "flaps" or chaos — embarking and disembarking from ships and railway carriages that go nowhere. Crouchback meets Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, a fire eater (probably based on Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a college friend of Waugh's father-in-law whom Waugh knew somewhat from his club) and Apthorpe, a very eccentric fellow officer; in an episode of high farce, the two have a battle of wits and military discipline over an Edwardian thunder-box (portable toilet) which Crouchback observes, amused and detached. Before being sent on active service, he attempts to seduce Virginia, secure in the knowledge that the Church still regards her as his wife; she refuses him. He and Ben Ritchie-Hook share an adventure during the Dakar Expedition in 1940. Apthorpe dies in Freetown, supposedly of a tropical disease; when it is discovered that Guy gave him a bottle of whisky when visiting him in hospital (there is an implication that Apthorpe's disease, unknown to Guy, was really alcoholic liver failure), Guy is sent home, having blotted his copybook. Thus ends the first book.

Crouchback eventually manages to find a place in a fledgeling commando brigade training on a Scottish island under an old friend, Tommy Blackhouse, for whom Virginia left him. Another trainee is Ivor Claire, whom Crouchback regards as the flower of English chivalry. He learns to exploit the niceties of military ways of doing things with the assistance of Colonel Jumbo Trotter, an elderly Halberdier who knows all the strings to pull. Crouchback is posted to Egypt, headquarters for the Middle East theatre of operations. This involves him in the evacuation of Crete, where he acquits himself well, though chaos and muddle prevail. At this time he meets Corporal Ludovic and they and a few others escape in a small boat, a most perilous undertaking. Ludovic murdered two men who know about his desertion; erroneously, he believes Crouchback does too so treats him as an enemy. Eventually they are rescued, delirious with thirst and exposure and taken back to Egypt, where Mrs Stitch, a character who turns up in other Waugh books, takes him under her well-connected wing and equally tries to protect Claire, who has also blotted his copybook. She sends Crouchback the long way home to England, where once more he finds himself in his club asking around for a suitable job. Thus ends the second book.

Crouchback spends 1941-1943 in Britain, mostly at desk jobs. He turns 40 and, with Germany's invasion of Russia and Britain's subsequent alliance with the Soviet Union, feels the futility of the war. American soldiers are all over London. Virginia has fallen on hard times and is reduced to selling her furs. She had been persuaded to accompany Trimmer, her former hairdresser who was set up as a war hero for media consumption. She becomes pregnant by him and searches futilely for an abortionist. Eventually she decides to look for a husband instead. Crouchback is chosen for parachute training prior to being sent into action one last time. Before he goes abroad, they are reconciled and remarry (resume their marriage, in the eyes of the Catholic Church). Virginia stays in London with his elderly bachelor uncle, Peregrine Crouchback and has her baby there. Despite being incorrectly suspected of pro-Axis sympathies because of his time in pre-war Italy and of his Catholicism, Guy is posted to Yugoslavia where he is appalled by the Partisans, befriends a small group of Jews and finds out that his former friend de Souza's loyalties are with Communism rather than with England. While Guy is overseas, a German doodlebug hits Peregrine's flat and kills him and Virginia, sparing the child, Gervase, who is in the country with Guy's sister. After the end of the war Guy meets the daughter of another old Catholic family and marries her. They have two sons in addition to Gervase and Guy farms the last of the Crouchback lands.

[edit] Themes

The novels have obvious echoes in Evelyn Waugh's wartime career; his participation in the Dakar expedition, his stint with the commandos, his time in Crete and his role in Yugoslavia. Unlike Crouchback, Waugh was not a cradle Catholic but a convert from the upper middle class — although Waugh clearly believed that the recusant experience was vital in the development of English Catholicism.

The novel is the most thorough treatment of the theme of Waugh's writing, first fully displayed in Brideshead Revisited: a celebration of the virtues of tradition, of family and feudal loyalty, of paternalist hierarchy, of the continuity of institutions and of the heroic ideal and the calamitous disappearance of these which has led to the emptiness and futility of the modern world.

[edit] Appreciation

It paints an ironic picture of regimental life in the British Army and is a satire on the wasteful and perverse bureaucracy of modern warfare. The point of view of Guy, whose Catholicism and Italian experience combine with his diffident personality to make him something of an outside observer in English society, enables Waugh to push the satire hard and remain in voice.

Underneath the comedy, the theme emerges ever more strongly. Guy Crouchback is a quintessentially English figure with his instinctive understanding of his culture, his hesitancy, courtesy and reluctance to make a scene. The novel reveals his discovery that the romantic worship of tradition and heroism — the aristocratic values which have supported him all his life — does not work in the modern world.

This is made explicit in the episode after which the novel is named, at the beginning of the third and final book. A splendid ceremonial sword is made "at the King's command", to be presented to the Soviet Union in recognition of the sacrifices that the Soviet people have made in the war against the Nazis (in reality, this was the jewelled sword commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad, commissioned by George VI). Before being sent to Moscow, it is put on display to the British public in Westminster Abbey; long queues of people "suffused with gratitude to their remote allies" come to worship it. Guy Crouchback is unmoved and chooses not to visit, as he is distinctly unenthused by Stalin: "he was not tempted to join them in their piety". Instead he goes for a surfeit of luxurious food for lunch on his 40th birthday and dwells neither on the past nor the future.

It is a resigned rather than an idealistic Guy who goes to Yugoslavia, and it is made clear that the future belongs not to idealism but to the cynical Trimmer or the empty American Padfield. We are never quite sure whether it is that Guy is powerless to resist the world's decline from a Golden Age of chivalry or whether the Golden Age was a romantic illusion.

[edit] Adaptations

There have been several adaptations of Sword of Honour:

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