The “SWORD OF HONOUR” trilogy (sometimes
called the “Crouchback” trilogy) by Evelyn Waugh – comprising “MEN AT ARMS”
(first published 1952); “OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN” (first published 1955); and
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” (first published 1961 - retitled “The End of Battle” in America)
Cecil Day Lewis, as a
left-winger, was probably somebody of whom Evelyn Waugh would not have
approved. But in his brief poem “Where Are The War Poets?”, Day Lewis wrote
four lines expressing a British view of the Second World War that could well
have been the epigraph to Waugh’s Sword
of Honour trilogy: “it is the logic
of our times,/ no subject for immortal verse- / that we who lived by honest
dreams / defend the bad against the worse.”
Under the farcical bits and the
satire and the accounts of campaigns that come close to being straight
reportage, Sword of Honour is
essentially a view of the Second World War as “defending the bad against the worse”. Britain is corrupt, run by
cads and bounders, its army has too many string-pullers who are praised for
non-existent heroics, there are con-men everywhere, there are fashionable young
men who promote Communism at the expense of Britain’s best interests – and yet
the blasted war still has to be fought, because what Hitler offers is
infinitely worse. And in fighting against what is infinitely worse, one can
attain a degree of honour and even act with a sort of chivalry.
I must admit to a very ambiguous
attitude towards the novels of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66). I enjoyed, in an
uncomplicated way, all his early farcical stuff, written between the late 1920s
and the early 1940s. Decline and Fall,
Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Put
Out More Flags. The pick of early Waugh remain A Handful of Dust (1934), with its strong tinge of melancholy
tempering the farce; and Scoop (1938), which is still the gold standard for what satires on
the media should be. But I’m much less positive about the later Waugh. This has
nothing to do with Waugh’s Catholicism (he had already converted to Catholicism
before he wrote most of his early satirical stuff). Nor has it anything to do
with what hostile critics perceived to be his snobbery. Rather, it has to do with
what I see as an unsuccessful straining after high seriousness. Brideshead Revisited (1945) has its
moments, but Waugh seems to have intended it as his masterpiece – a consciously
“serious” novel after all the meaningful foolery; and for me it just doesn’t
come off. I am half in agreement with the view that it confuses religious
experience with the comforts of living among wealthy aristocrats. This view was
frequently expressed by non-religious and left-wing critics, so it is worth
pointing out that the first negative reviews the immensely popular Brideshead Revisited received were
published in church newspapers, which said that the faith expressed in the
novel came close to being a disguised materialism. Waugh, they implied, seemed
to be saying that you are nearer to God if you say your prayers from a prie-Dieu in a stately home.
Given this, then, I was
reluctant to read Waugh’s Sword of Honour
trilogy. Indeed, its three volumes have sat unread on my shelves for many years
and I roused myself to read them for the first time in the summer holidays just
past. Sword of Honour first appeared
as the three separate novels Men at Arms
(1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
and Unconditional Surrender (1961).
The gap between the appearance of the second and third volumes is explained by
the fact that Waugh had had a nervous breakdown at that time (partly
exacerbated by his heavy drinking), about which he wrote in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). Only
after all three novels had been published separately did they acquire the title
Sword of Honour and get published
together – and before that happened, Waugh made some excisions and emendations
to the text. But I have read the three books in first editions, as they were
originally presented to the public, and it is upon them that my comments are
based.
To dispose of the basic stuff
first – the three novels recount, in the third-person, the experiences of Guy
Crouchback in the British Army in the Second World War.
At the opening of Men at Arms, it is 1939, war has just broken
out, and Guy is 35 years old. He has sorrows in his life. He is the last
surviving heir to a minor aristocratic English Catholic family, but he has been
divorced for eight years from his frivolous socialite wife Virginia, and he has
no son to succeed him. Guy has never been a soldier,
but after a lot of wangling, he joins the [fictitious] Halberdiers regiment as
an officer-in-training. Being older then all his fellow trainee officers, he
soon acquires the nickname “Uncle”. In the second volume of the series, the
basic mechanism of the trilogy’s narrative is revealed when we are told “There should be a drug for soldiers, Guy
thought, to put them asleep until they were needed.” (Officers and Gentlemen Book One, Chapter 6). In effect this is the
“Hurry up! Hurry up! WAIT!” view of the army, where officers as well as men
have brief spasms of active service surrounded by long periods of tedium,
idleness and training. Thus, in Men at
Arms, Guy goes through his training and gets accustomed to regimental life.
Keeping “plot”, as such, going in this first volume is the flamboyant trainee
officer Apthorpe, apparently swashbuckling and confident and claiming African
war experience when he is in reality a shyster, confidence trickster and
fantasist. His schemes and adventures counterpoint Crouchback’s and our
slow-dawning understanding that war will be a serious business. After much
idling and slacking by the trainee officers, there enters a new commander, the
old-school Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, who knocks some ginger into them. But it is
all a big build-up to a great letdown, for when the regiment eventually goes
into action, in 1940, it is as part of a farcical and unsuccessful attempt to
help the Free French wrest Dakar from Vichy.
As the second
volume Officers and Gentlemen begins,
the reality of war is still sinking in. (The opening pages have a description
of the Blitz as if its flames are an aesthetic experience rendered by Turner).
Guy is sent for Commando training to the Scottish Isle of Mugg. In 1941, Guy
and his company are eventually shipped to Alexandria. Waugh indulges in some
heavy irony at the expense of fashionable people and army officers in
Alexandria who are completely complacent about the loss of Greece and who
imagine that Crete will easily be held. One remarks: “Everything in Crete is under control. The navy broke up the sea landing
and sunk the lot. The enemy only hold two pockets and the New Zealanders have
got them completely contained. Reinforcements are rolling in every night for
the counter-attack” (Officers and
Gentlemen Book Two, Chapter 4). Just a few pages later, the utter shambles
that was the British and Commonwealth defence of Crete is revealed. Guy and the
Halberdiers are among the last sent to the defence of the island, and their
role rapidly comes to be the rear-guard protecting the massive (and shambolic)
retreat and evacuation. There is the odd sardonic comment, especially about
officers pushing their way to the fore to be evacuated, but it is notable that
the events of Officers and Gentlemen
set in Crete are not comic ones. Real and nasty war is being reported here in
almost documentary detail. The character of Major Hound (nicknamed “Fido”)
comes to the fore in these passages. Hound is essentially a pitiable old
Colonel Blimp type who is completely lost without any orders to follow, and
represents the end of the line for a certain sort of British officer. For New
Zealand readers, it is interesting that New Zealanders are frequently mentioned
in Waugh’s narrative, usually in complimentary terms as soldiers who are more
willing then others to put up a fight. By the time Guy is evacuated and gets
back to Alexandria, his heroic view of the war is severely dented. He loses his
temporary rank of captain and is unwillingly posted back to England. Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen ends with a sense of ironic deflation, but
there is nothing comic or farcical about the irony this time.
As it appeared
six years after Officers and Gentlemen,
the final volume Unconditional Surrender
begins with Waugh considerately providing a four-page synopsis of the plot so
far. (Obviously this was one of the things that were dropped when the trilogy
was later printed as one fat volume). Guy is back in England for what he sees
as two wasted years (1941-43). He has grown to be 39 and is officially too old
to be sent again on active service overseas, so he spends much of his time
training younger officers and men. It is at this time that his father dies.
Despite his age, Guy is sent by the Halberdiers to train with commandos as a
parachutist. In 1944, he is sent to Croatia as a liaison officer with the
Yugoslav partisans who are still fighting the retreating Germans. Guy observes
the partisans being infiltrated and taken over by Russian Communists. Some of
the English officers (Frank de Souza and Cattermole – both of them based on
real people) are either members of the Communist Party or fellow travellers.
Guy observes, but cannot do anything to avert, deals that are made compromising
real liberation and selling out the exiled government (in London) of the
Yugoslav king. He notes the start of a persecution of the church as Communist
power increases. Indeed in Croatia, what with the sham displays put on by
partisan leaders to impress visiting Allied missions, Guy sees more subversion
than real liberation. If the endings of Men
at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen
were ironical in terms of, respectively, farce and tragedy, then the irony that
ends Unconditional Surrender is
despairing. There is a thoroughly dispiriting finale to the narrative proper
when a kindly act Guy performs for two Jewish refugees leads to their death at
the hands of the partisans. The implication is that, in Yugoslavia, a new
totalitarian regime is being established as the German and collaborationist one
is being driven out.
In its original
(1961) form, Unconditional Surrender
has a brief epilogue set post-war where, in the very last paragraph, Waugh
makes an unconvincing nod towards a conventional happy ending for Guy. This
final paragraph was one of the things Waugh amended when the three novels were
gathered into their final form. Guy’s future remains bleak to the end.
All “plot
summaries”, like the one I have just given, are reductionist and miss out much
of what drives any novel along. It’s important to note, for example, that a
recurring subplot concerns Guy’s relationship with his ex-wife Virginia. She
has been married twice since her marriage to Guy, her second husband being one
Tommy Blackhouse, who for part of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback’s commanding
officer, with all the social embarrassments that necessarily ensue. At one
point, believing (as a Catholic) that in the eyes of God, Virginia is still his
wife, Guy attempts unsuccessfully to seduce her to produce his desired heir.
For most of the trilogy, Virginia has the surname of her third husband and is
Mrs Troy, but she is in the process of divorcing Mr Troy. A slimy character
called Trimmer sets out to seduce her and leaves her pregnant. How Virginia
resolves this problem (the details are fairly sordid), and what impact it has
on Guy Crouchback’s life, form a major part of the second half of Unconditional Surrender.
Trimmer, a
bounder, cad and liar, is another recurring character in the novels, falsely
lauded for courageous actions in battle, which he did not perform, and set up
by wartime propaganda as a morale-boosting hero. Through him, Waugh blasts the
whole cult of personality and the lies that propaganda creates in wartime. The
cynical and opportunist liaison journalist Ian Kilbannock, speaking of the
commandos, says “Delightful fellows,
heroes too, but the Wrong Period. Last war stuff, Guy. Went out with Rupert
Brooke” (Officers and Gentlemen
Book One, Chapter 10). Yet later Kilbannock is to the fore in fabricating
Trimmer’s heroism for public consumption.
More sinister,
though, even if as farcical in places, is one Ludovic, a fellow officer who
regards himself as something of a writer. It is strongly implied (without being
directly stated) that Ludovic is personally and deliberately responsible for
the deaths of some British soldiers in the scramble that is the evacuation of
Crete. Ludovic suspects that Guy Crouchback knows this. As a result, when he is
in a position of power, he makes sure that Guy is sent somewhere dangerous (Croatia)
in the hopes of getting rid of him. Ludovic later flourishes writing pieces for
the arty magazine “Survival”, and produces a widely-discussed avant-garde novel. This is Waugh taking a poke at the leftist
bent of publications such as “Penguin New Writing” and “Horizon”, and the
fatuities of the literary intelligentsia.
Most devastating
of all is the very minor character of Ivo Claire, whom Guy at first reckons to
be a chivalrous gentleman-officer like himself. The gradual revelation that Ivo
Claire too is opportunistic and self-promoting punctures Guy Crouchback’s
worldview as much as the ending of each of the three novels do.
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One way of
discussing the Sword of Honour
trilogy is to relate it to Evelyn Waugh’s own life. Much of it is
thinly-disguised autobiography. Whole books have been written (I haven’t read
them) comparing in minute detail Guy Crouchback’s war service with Evelyn
Waugh’s. Briefly, Waugh – like Guy – was in his mid-thirties when the war broke
out. Even though he was on the old side for military service, he managed to get
a commission and served as an officer from 1939 to 1944. He never rose to a
rank higher than acting captain. Like Guy, he had commando training, took part
in the raid on Dakar, was in the evacuation force helping stragglers off Crete
(where he was commended for bravery) and, after two years training recruits (in
which time he wrote Brideshead Revisited),
was parachuted into Yugoslavia to help the partisans. Additionally, his father
died during the war, just as Guy Crouchback’s father does.
Yet the novel is
a novel and Guy Crouchback is not Evelyn Waugh, even if he shares many of the
author’s values. Waugh had indeed been divorced, before he converted to Catholicism,
but he remarried happily enough (despite some sexual dalliances) and had a
family. There was no real-life parallel to Guy’s relationship with his ex-wife
Virginia. The novels have no equivalent to Waugh’s wartime friendship with
Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s silly and bibulous son, who was with
Waugh in his time in Yugoslavia. Perhaps more important, though he married into
the minor aristocracy and mingled with the tone-iest people, Waugh was
middle-class by birth. He may have admired the old Catholic aristocracy, but
unlike Guy he was not born to it. In some respects, then, Guy is Waugh’s
idealised view of himself.
Stepping away
from autobiography, what are the novels saying?
In some sense,
they are about the legitimacy of patriotism in time of war, and its subversion
by a new set of values. At first Guy is alienated from the silly social whirl
of London club life where “there were
many familiar faces but no friends.” (Men
at Arms Prologue). He is seeking a purpose. Although he has never served
in the forces, the outbreak of war immediately tells him that his country needs
him. In the Halberdiers regiment “he had been experiencing something he had missed in boyhood, a happy
adolescence.” And “he loved the whole
Corps deeply and tenderly” (Men at Arms Book One, Chapter 1). When
the new brigadier tells the young officers of their real duties, we are told:
“At
these words Guy’s shame left him and pride flowed back. He ceased for the time
being to be the lonely and ineffective man – the man he so often thought he saw
in himself, past his first youth, cuckold, wastrel, prig – who had washed and
shaved and dressed at Claridge’s, lunched at Bellamy’s and caught the afternoon
train; he was one with his regiment, with all their historic feats of arms
behind him, with great opportunities to come. He felt from head to foot a
physical tingling and bristling as though charged with a galvanic current.”
(Men at Arms Book Two, Chapter 1)
Not only has
serving in a just war given him a purpose and the possibility of personal
redemption, but he sees it in terms of chivalry and honour. As a Catholic, he
wears a holy medal given to him by his father. The contrast of two swords
provides the trilogy with its dominant symbol. Guy is living in Italy when war
breaks out. In Men at Arms, he at
once goes to a local church and swears his loyalty to his country and professes
his chivalrous attitudes on the graven sword of the statue of an old English
warrior-saint. But two novels later, the first chapter of Unconditional Surrender narrates Guy’s refusal to be impressed by
the sword of honour, on display in Westminster Abbey, which the King of England
is officially presenting to the city of Stalingrad. For Guy, who joined up when
Hitler and Stalin were allies, the honest and chivalrous aims of the war have
been corrupted by Britain’s alliance with one totalitarian state against
another.
Guy’s father
clearly represents the old attitudes of courtesy and charity that are spurned
in this new sort of war. Old Mr Crouchback is retired but is forced to make
ends met by teaching the junior forms at a private school. He lives in a shabby
private hotel. The hotel’s grasping
owners are hoping that their permanent residents will be forced out by
billeting officers, so that they can charge more for transient guests. They
cannot understand the natural charity of Mr Crouchback, who voluntarily gives
up his room for somebody in need. As the hotelier says: “He’s a deep one, and no mistake. I never have understood him, not
properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than your and mine.” (Officers
and Gentlemen Book One, Chapter 4). Old Crouchback’s mind is “different”
only because it works by values that are concerned with the traditional idea of
charity and not concerned with making a profit. Book Two of Unconditional Surrender is called “Fin
de Ligne” as it clearly is the end of the family line when old Crouchback dies
(his funeral is described in great detail in Book Two, Chapter 3) and Guy has
no heir. In these symbolic ways, effects of the war in England represent the
end of a patriotic and chivalrous ideal.
As Waugh tells
it, many things caused true patriotism to decay. One major enemy was on the
Left. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war, as England’s ally, makes Guy
Crouchback’s mood very black indeed. He hears of this new alliance when he is
stationed near the Mediterranean and:
“It was
just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of
the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light
and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise
cast off, the modern age in arms.” (Officers
and Gentlemen Book Two, Chapter 7)
In 1939, there
was a clear-cut conflict between a totalitarian power and democracies. Now, in
mid-1941, the morality of the war becomes very muddled indeed. No wonder Guy’s
Blimpish Uncle Peregrine is confused and forgets who the enemy is supposed to
be, remarking:
“Shocking news from the eastern front. The
Bolshevists are advancing again. Germans don’t seem able to stop them. I’d
sooner see the Japanese in Europe – at least they have a king and some sort of
religion. If one can believe the papers we are actually helping the
Bolshevists. It’s a mad world, my masters.” (Unconditional Surrender Book Two, Chapter 6)
Prior to
Operation Barbarossa, Guy is already aware of the presence of bright young
middle-class English Communists in key positions. Thus he speaks of:
“Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters,
that bizarre product of total war that was to proliferate through five acres of
valuable London property, engrossing the simple high staff officers of all the
Services with experts, charlatans, plain lunatics and every unemployed
member of the British Communist Party – HOO HQ, at this stage of its
history, occupied three flats in a supposedly luxurious modern block.” (Officers and Gentlemen Book One, Chapter
5) [emphasis added]
As Waugh was
writing in the 1950s, those who disliked his conservatism could dismiss these
ideas as right-wing paranoia, or a snobby form of McCarthyism. But Waugh’s perception was accurate. It took
most of the 1950s for Britain to understand that its spy service was riddled
with smooth upper-middle-class Soviet agents. Even before Waugh began his
trilogy, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had already defected to the Soviet
Union (in 1951). Kim Philby was under suspicion, but didn’t defect until 1963;
and the revelation that John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt were also Soviet
agents came out even later. Waugh has his fictitious character Cattermole
deliberately falsifying reports about Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, and
consciously assisting the sidelining of the Yugoslav government in exile.
Cattermole is based on another member of the Cambridge spy circle, the
Communist James Klugmann, whom Waugh knew (and disliked) in Yugoslavia. (Geoff
Andrew’s biography of Klugmann, The
Shadow Man, was published in 2015). Inasmuch as British wartime policy
concerning Yugoslavia was directed by information supplied by MI6, it was
directed by Kim Philby. Score one for Waugh who, by the time he wrote his
trilogy, would have had the added amusement of seeing the Yugoslav Communist
Tito now being denounced as a traitor and heretic by the Moscow faithful.
Yet it is not
only on the extreme Left that Waugh sees the decay and corruption of British
values and wartime aims. He is suspicious of the growing American cultural
influence, seen in the novelty of “American parcels” coming from English
kids who have been evacuated to the USA. The character of “Loot” (Lieutenant)
Padfield represents the superficiality of American journalism as he rushes
around praising and “boosting” anything that seems to the Allies’ advantage, no
matter how inane. In
Officers and Gentlemen (Book Two, Chapter 6) there is the grotesque scene
where the manufactured “hero” Trimmer fronts up with three American journalists
whom Waugh unsubtly calls Bum, Scab and Joe. Of course England has amoral
bounders of its own in this novel, and is perfectly capable of corrupting
herself. But when Waugh disposes of Virginia from the novel, he takes a
rhetorical whack at the promiscuous heroines of inter-war novels by having a
character quoting from Aldous Huxley, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Huxley was English, but the predominance of such novels was American.
Quite apart from
the trilogy’s political views, there are other things that annoyed many readers
when it first appeared. Generally, and despite Guy Crouchback’s high
aspirations, the view of war is very unheroic and has no room for “their finest
hour” rhetoric. Satirical shafts are shot at sacred cows. The early phases of Men at Arms, set during the “phoney
war”, depict well-connected young men scrambling to find themselves comfy
berths for the duration, where they can sit out the war far from the firing
line. When Churchill becomes prime minister, we are told:
“Guy knew of Mr. Churchill only as a
professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an
advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and
Lloyd George.” (Men at Arms Book
Two, Chapter 8)
The awful
Trimmer refers to the “epic” of Dunkirk thus:
“You mustn’t mind old Ivor. He and I are
great pals and chaff each other a bit. Did you spot his M.C.? Do you know how
he got it? At Dunkirk, for shooting three territorials who were trying to swamp
his boat. Great chap old Ivor.” (Officers
and Gentlemen Book One, Chapter 6)
There is also a
well-earned crack at a much loved, but fatuous, BBC wartime commentator.
Speaking of a new National Service man, Waugh remarks “His ‘braininess’ was not oppressive. The imputation derived chiefly
from the facts that he read Mr. J.B.Priestley’s novels, and was strangely
dishevelled in appearance.” (Men at
Arms Book Two, Chapter 7).
Then there is
the matter of Guy Crouchback’s Catholicism, and his sense of alienation from
much of society because of his religion. More than once, plot contrivances
(wherein Guy remains a mere lieutenant – sometimes acting captain – while
scoundrels gain promotion) have Guy suspected of treason because of his
religion. In Alexandria, he goes to confession to an Alsatian priest who is
suspected of working for the enemy. In Croatia, Communist partisans watch him
closely as he takes communion, to ensure he is not passing on information to
Yugoslav royalists.
At the funeral of Guy’s father, Guy’s inane
brother-in-law Arthur Box-Bender, trying to make a compliment, says to the
officiating priest something that would be anathema to any Catholic:
“I’m not a member of your persuasion but I’m
bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless.
You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more
than you can say of one or two of our bishops.” (Unconditional Surrender Book Two,
Chapter 3)
His religion
helps make Crouchback an outsider, even when he is most at home in military
service.
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All of this says
what the novel is about, and records accurately Waugh’s own ideas. But what is
a fair judgment on it?
With reluctance,
I have to say that reading the Sword of
Honour trilogy has not altered my view of the later Waugh. While his
earlier satirical novels tackle serious subjects, Sword of Honour finds him still straining after seriousness in the
sections where he is not being outright funny. The tone is very uncertain.
There are many passages of pure farce – in Men at Arms the silly shenanigans as
officers younger than Guy take to calling him “Uncle” and play out their mess
rituals and games with a degree of infantilism signalled by fact that they are,
for some time, quartered in an old school. The first novel has the pure bedroom
farce of Crouchback, on leave in London, attempting to seduce his ex-wife while
the ‘phone keeps ringing and interrupting him whenever he reaches the crucial
point. The sections of Officers and
Gentlemen concerning the Isle of Mugg seem to have wandered out of a
Compton Mackenzie novel, what with the laird who wants to borrow army
explosives to blow things up and the eccentric civilian professor who wants to
train soldiers to survive on limpets and sea weed and the crazy Scottish
Nationalist girl scattering pamphlets about the benefits of a Hitler victory.
In Unconditional Surrender there is
the long and farcical conversation between Virginia and Uncle Peregrine, where
the old buffer is completely at cross purposes with the experienced minx as he
fails to understand why she is suddenly amorous towards members of his family.
Admittedly the
farce sometimes takes on a bitter, satirical edge, as in the depiction (in Officers and Gentlemen) of the society
hostess Mrs Stitch in Alexandria [based on the bitchy Lady Diana Cooper], who
does genuinely know all the army gossip, but uses it to punish or “cut” people.
Just as often, though, farce strays into in-joke. In Men at Arms, the shyster Apthorpe’s portable lavatory – the object
of many farcical manoeuvres – is called “Connolly’s Chemical Closet”, with
Waugh repeating the sort of joke against his sometime friend Cyril Connolly
which he had deployed in Put Out More
Flags (where a horrible family of unruly evacuee children are called the
Connollys). Indeed the text has too many in-jokes to record here.
Of course comedy
and tragedy can mix. Of course serious novels can have “comic relief”. But the
effect is still very jarring when Waugh switches from this sort of thing to the
documentary seriousness of accounts of rifle practice and parachute training
and the military disaster on Crete.
I also find
myself not wholly convinced by the character of Crouchback himself. Patriotism,
honour, even a sort of chivalry, are virtues that can be defended rationally,
but Crouchback’s conception of them is so out of synch with the 20th
century that it is hard to believe anyone began the Second World War holding to
such views. (Certainly Evelyn Waugh didn’t – his reportage on Mexico and on the
Abyssinian War show somebody already disabused of a romantic view of conflict
and war). Perhaps this is where Waugh’s idealisation of himself comes in. He (a
middle-class chap) volunteered from patriotic motives – but in Guy he
fantasises about what the even more exalted motives of a right-thinking minor
Catholic aristocrat might have been. Guy becomes an ideal against which the
deceptions and self-interest of others in wartime are measured. It need hardly
be said that Guy Crouchback in no way represents the views of his English
co-religionists. Most English Catholics (predominantly middle-class and
working-class) joined up for the same reasons anybody else did – mainly seeing
the war against Hitler as an unpleasant necessity.
On
top of this, and for all the activity in which he is involved, Guy comes across
as
mentally somehow passive, and more often put upon than initiating activities or
relationships. In the midst of other people, he is a sad sack and mental
recluse. There is only one point in the whole trilogy where I find him
expressing something like joy, and that is when he takes his first parachute
jump, which is related thus:
“He experienced rapture, something as near as
his earthbound soul could reach to a foretaste of paradise….. The aeroplane
seemed as far distant as will, at the moment of death, the spinning earth. As
though he had cast the constraining bonds of flesh and muscle and nerve, he
found himself floating free; the harness that had irked him in the narrow,
dusky, resounding carriage now almost imperceptibly supported him. He was a
free spirit in an element as fresh as on the day of its creation.” (Unconditional Surrender Book Two Chapter
5)
Floating free in
the air unencumbered by other human beings. Seeing everything sub specie aeternitatis and without
intrusive trivialities. It is an interesting idealisation, but hardly a
credible character.
Sensible Footnote: For the record, it is possible to find on-line intelligent and
detailed theological analyses of Sword of
Honour, which show the extent to which the sequence reflects Christian
virtues, including the unfashionable virtue of sacrifice, which is at odds in
Guy Crouchback’s soul with his tendency to sloth and comfort.
Foolish
Footnote: Sword
of Honour has been spared being
made into a feature film, but Wikipedia informs me that it has twice been made
into serials by British television – once in 1967 with Edward Woodward as Guy
Crouchback; and again in 2001 with Daniel Craig (later the most lugubrious of
James Bonds) in the lead role. As I have seen neither of these two serials, you
will be spared my pompous comments on them.
Oddity
Footnote: There is a scene in Men at Arms where a brigadier addresses young officers thus: “When the tables have been cleared there will
be a game of Housey-housey, here. For the benefit of the young officers I
should explain that it is what civilians, I believe, call Bingo.” [Men at Arms Book Two, Chapter 1]. As a
New Zealander, I am intrigued by this, because it implies that Housey (or
Housie) was the name given to the game by the English upper classes and
military, while mere proles called it Bingo. New Zealanders of my generation
will know that, by all classes of New Zealander, the game (most often played in
church halls) was always known as Housie. The term Bingo began to be deployed
here only after new groups of English immigrants arrived in the 1960s. It may
be another case of the great New Zealand unwashed adopting the habits of
English toffs rather than of the English masses – like making the public school
game of rugby our national sport rather than real football.
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