Men at Arms

MEN AT ARMS is the first volume of Evelyn Waugh's World War II trilogy, "Sword of Honour." The protagonist of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback, a thoroughly decent and self-effacing English gentleman, although differentiated slightly by being a practicing Roman Catholic. As the novel opens in the summer of 1939, Guy, nearly 36, has experienced few successes in life and suffered one major disappointment -- his wife Virginia having precipitously left him for another man (the first of many), leading to a divorce that Guy's church does not recognize as freeing him. When World War II breaks out, Guy, with nothing better to do than be "fodder" for the war machine, scrambles for some way to contribute to the war effort. Through an acquaintance of his father (who also is a thoroughly decent and self-effacing English gentleman), Guy finds a posting in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, where, because of his age, he is known to all as "uncle". In this first volume of Waugh's trilogy, there is little actual warfare. Instead, most of the novel is devoted to setting the stage, to six months of training in the British Isles, and, finally, a side-show expedition to Dakar and French Senegal, where there is one brief clandestine skirmish in which Guy participates. Hence, to the extent that MEN AT ARMS is a war novel, it is about soldiers in training, building a certain camaraderie and esprit de corps but also bedeviled by bureaucratic absurdities and a seemingly endless succession of abruptly cancelled and changed, or inconsistent, orders. But MEN AT ARMS is much more than a war novel. It also is a rueful depiction of a changing Great Britain, in which the old order of gentlemen of loyalty, family, faith, and integrity -- such as Guy and his father -- are being demographically and politically overwhelmed by a new generation of hoi polloi and self-aggrandizers with only a thin veneer of culture, religion, and manners. The "long view" is in the course of being foreshortened considerably, and World War II promises to accelerate that process. (The justified response might be that the old order that is passing is an undeserving or out-dated aristocracy, and that what is succeding it is, quite simply, a meritocracy in which the criteria for success are rather new and different.) The story and themes of MEN AT ARMS do not, by themselves, constitute a compelling reason to read the novel. What truly distinguishes the novel is Evelyn Waugh's superb writing. It flows effortlessly along at a brisk pace, often carried by well-constructed dialogue. There are no ostentatious or donnish words; no intricately constructed sentences with strained syntax that one is compelled to re-read; and no instances where Waugh belabors a point. To the extent that he goes beyond his gentle satire and interjects some sort of explicit personal comment, it always is lightly done, almost off-hand. (An example is the following sentence concerning the scandalous treatment of prisoners aboa

Exile Guy Crouchback returns home to the United Kingdom on the eve of World War II, fully expecting a glorious self-immolation in the cause of all that is right and noble. Instead he is plunked into the middle of a farcical parade where tired gray men do the best they can to lose a war against a dangerous, devouring adversary while underlings move like spastic marionettes beneath bony fingers.The result is no happy marriage for Guy, though happy marriages have not been his lot. He was married once, to a scheming heartbreaker named Virginia who divorced him for a career as a serial bride. Guy's strict Catholicism forbids him from marrying again, though as the last in his aristocratic line, such a situation means dereliction of duty in the posterity department. Stuck in every sense of the word, like Miniver Cheevy living mostly in the past, he views the onset of war as a means of redemption against the atheistic hordes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, aligned at the war's outset in the partition of Poland.After a struggle, Guy finds himself enlisted in an army brigade where the golden mean is one of bare competence, and bureaucratic "banf" trumps all. France falls, and Norway, and the future is decidedly bleak. Whether Britain can ever rally is a point very much in doubt at book's end, though it doesn't seem likely Guy will help much.That said, the first of Evelyn Waugh's "Sword Of Honor" is actually a pretty funny read most of the way through. The dialogue is crisp and clever; the plot twists ingenuously lurid. Author Evelyn Waugh has obvious fun recalling his own second youth (he enlisted in his mid-30s) and overseeing the zany exploits of his off-kilter comrades. While Guy spends a lot of time in the shadows, his emergence to be the subject of the later books, "Men At Arms" focuses on characters he meets who shed light on the various all-too-human traits of His Majesty's armed forces.For example, brigade commander Ritchie-Hook is a one-eyed loon obsessed with attack and "biffing" the enemy. "There are no Sundays in the firing-line," he declaims. At one point, angered by his troops' inability at the shooting range, he runs over to the trench beneath the target butts, pokes his head up, and promises a reward to anyone who can nail him. They don't, maybe because they really try.The book actually belongs to another character, Apthorpe, a strange, "rather rum" fellow who befriends Guy and in time enlists his aid on a mission to keep Ritchie-Hook from making use of Apthorpe's private "thunderbox," a.k.a. port-o-potty. This gets rather involved, with hushed nighttime conferences between Guy and Apthorpe that wind up somehow getting reported to British Intelligence, before the two conspirators' plot stumbles its way to a charged and highly entertaining conclusion.If "Men At Arms" had ended there, it would be seen as an engagingly comic though perhaps shallow look at military service during the first and least nasty days of World War II, what would be

When Waugh wrote this trilogy, between 1951 and 1964, people loved the acerbity of his writing. But they found Crouchback and his views perverse. In those days, the thought that the Second World War might have been an error which left the world worse than it found it was almost unthinkable. There had been frightful blunders such as Singapore, admitted the reader in the National Health spectacles. But to see it all as a mistake, you would have to be...well, either a fascist or a believer in something perfectly weird. For instance, a devout member of the old English Roman Catholic aristocracy. Down the narrow perspective of that particular telescope, through which the welfare of the Vatican mattered more than cutting Axis communications in the Balkans, things might well look different. They did to fictional Guy Crouchback. -The Crouchback tendency (Neal Ascherson, January 7, 2001, The Observer) Like many of Evelyn Waugh's books, this one--the first in the Sword of Honour trilogy--is at least semi-autobiographical. But, whereas other life experiences gave him the fodder to savagely satirize such things as adultery/divorce, journalism, Africa, and Hollywood, his treatment of his checkered military career, probably tempered by a natural patriotism, comes in more for gentle ribbing. So there are plenty of amusing characters and absurd situations, beginning with the nature of the enlistee, Guy Crouchback, himself: 'We don't want cannon-fodder this time'--from the Services--'we learned our lesson in 1914 when we threw away the pick of the nation. That's what we've suffered from ever since. 'But I'm not the pick of the nation,' said Guy. 'I'm natural fodder. I've no dependants. I've no special skill in anything. What's more I'm getting old. I'm ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.' 'I'm afraid that's not the official view. I'll put you on our list and see you're notified as soon as anything turns up.' But Mr. Waugh's heart, understandably, doesn't seem to be invested in really letting loose on the British armed services. This combines with the subject of the story--the painfully slow build-up to war--to render a novel that's somewhat less spirited than many of his others. However, it does have one feature that more than redeems it and makes it not only one of his most invaluable works, but one of the most important novels of WWII: its ferocious criticism of the British decision to accept the Soviet Union as an ally, rather than treat her as an enemy just as dangerous as Nazi Germany. Guy's initial fervor for war comes as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact: Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines anno

i've just finished all three novels in the 'sword of honor' trilogy: men at arms, officers and gentlemen and the end of the battle. not being a fan of satire, i've come late to waugh. to call him simply a writer of satire, as many persons do, is a serious literary mistake. these novels have comic and satiric flavors, but actually are quite serious, poignant, painful, and powerful. his technical style is understated and, thus deceptive in its weight.the main character in all three novels, guy crouchback, is forced onto his privileged knees, and made to crawl to insight into the human condition, primarily to learn that war is only an occasionally more deadly mirror of peace, and that an absence of empathy is the start of it all. danger does not justify privilege for a man or a nation.these are very sad, funny, wise, and deeply well written novels and i would highly recommend them.

Better than Anthony Powell's depiction of British military life during WW2, and much better than Catch 22. A shame the Back Bay Books cover is so unnecessarily hideous...