Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh

First published: 1965: Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; Unconditional Surrender, 1961 (The End of the Battle, 1962)

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: 1931-1951

Locale: England, Scotland, West Africa, Egypt, Crete, Italy, and Yugoslavia

Principal Characters:

• Guy Crouchback, the protagonist, the sole surviving son of an ancient English Catholic family, who becomes an army officer following the outbreak of World War II
• Virginia Troy, his ex-wife, whom he eventually remarries
• Gervase Crouchback, his father
• Apthorpe, Guy’s fellow officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers
• Frank de Souza, a Halberdier officer
• Trimmer, a military misfit, who becomes Virginia’s lover
• Ludovic, an aspiring writer, who becomes an officer in Guy’ Commando unit
• Ivor Claire, a Commando officer
• Tommy Blackhouse, the Colonel of Guy’s Commando unit and Virginia’s lover
• Ben Ritchle-Hook, the Brigadier-General whose command includes both the Halberdiers and the Commandos

The Novels

The three novels that constitute Sword of Honour present a sweeping panorama of the effects of World War II upon English society, as seen through the consciousness of, and through events which impinge upon, Guy Crouch back. The first novel in the series, Men at Arms, begins by recounting how Guy has frittered away the eight years preceding 1939 in an attempt to forget his divorce from his ex-wife, Virginia Troy. Although he has been unable to overcome the bitterness and depression caused by her adulterous desertion the outbreak of the war fills him with fresh hope. The thirty-six-year-old Guy embarks upon a frantic quest for a regiment which will accept a man of his age and background, and, after many rejections, he is finally accepted for officer training in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers.

This ancient and honorable regiment offers Guy many of the satisfaction he has missed as a lonely, introverted bachelor. The shared privations and consequent camaraderie of military life make it easy for him to relate to his peers, who are drawn from a wide variety of lower-middle-class to upper middle-class backgrounds. Here, Guy first encounters many of the characters who will reappear throughout the trilogy: Trimmer, Frank de Souza, and Ben Ritchie-Hook are among those whose careers develop in intermittent counterpoint to that of Guy, although it is the inimitable Apthorpe who dominates the latter part of Men at Arms.

Apthorpe initially strikes Guy as a paragon of military and masculine virtue, but it soon transpires that Apthorpe’s confident exterior masks an ultimately fatal propensity for failure. The destruction of Apthorpe’s pretensions is treated in an essentially humorous manner, and the account of his struggle with Ritchie-Hook over the ownership of a portable latrine is one of the comic highpoints of the trilogy. Guy’s gradual realization of the truth about Apthorpe parallels his growing insight into the nature of soldiering, which he comes to see as a combination of laudable impulses and ridiculous rules. In the final pages of Men at Arms, Guy helps Ritchie-Hook stage a forbidden raid on enemy territory and becomes the inadvertent agent of Apthorpe’s death, occurrences which put a blot on his army record but which reinforce him in the conviction that he now understands the system well enough to know when personal considerations make it necessary to break with military discipline.

Officers and Gentlemen, the middle volume in the trilogy, offers a large-scale elaboration of the idea that war embodies strong elements of both tragedy and farce. Guy has transferred into a Commando force led by Tommy Blackhouse, who, despite being Virginia’s lover, now impresses Guy as a model officer. After a horrendously difficult period of training in the wilds of Scotland, during which Guy becomes friends with a stylish fellow officer, Ivor Claire, the Commandos are sent to Egypt to await posting to operations in the Mediterranean. Guy has by now become an integral part of his unit and is looking forward to proving himself in battle.

In a farcical subplot, Trimmer, who has had an affair with Virginia during leave in Glasgow, is, through a series of ludicrous misunderstandings, selected to lead an attack upon an enemy outpost. The mistakes continue when he is landed in the wrong place and destroys the wrong objective, but the propagandists’ need for good news results in this being blown up into a daringly successful exploit. Trimmer becomes a national hero and now begins to become a positive embarrassment to those who, like Virginia and his superior officers, previously treated him as an amusing figure of fun.

Guy’s Commandos are now ordered into the battle for Crete. Tommy Blackhouse has broken his leg and is unable to come with them, a fact which contributes to their total confusion and ignominious defeat when finally confronted by German troops. During this debacle, Guy stumbles across the Halberdiers calmly carrying out the duties of a rear guard and realizes that it is tradition and cohesion which make effective soldiers out of raw civilians. Such self-discipline is vividly contrasted with the cowardice of Claire and Ludovic, who are seen to be capable of any enormity in their fear for their personal safety. In another series of absurd misunderstandings, Claire’s desertion is exonerated and Ludovic’s murder of at least two British soldier is rewarded with a medal for bravery. Guy then spends the autumn of 1944 recuperating from the physical and psychological consequences of his ordeal much chastened by having learned that war elicits the worst as well as the best from human nature.

The final volume, The End of the Battle (published originally in Great Britain as Unconditional Surrender), begins by bringing the reader up-to-date with Guy’s experiences in the two years following the loss of Crete. He has returned to the Halberdiers and helped to train the regiment’s new recruits, but in the fall of 1943, he is told that he is too old—he is now forty—to go on active service with them. While knocking about London in search of a meaningful post, he learns of Ludovic’s rising literary reputation and becomes friends again with Virginia, who is pregnant with Trimmer’s child and unable to arrange for an abortion. They finally agree to remarry, as Guy decides that here at last he can perform an unquestionably good deed in assuming responsibility for a life that might otherwise be lost.

He then succeeds in being assigned to the British mission to the Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, where he again encounters Frank de Souza and Ritchie-Hook. Although, by this time, Guy has become somewhat inured to the spectacle of human suffering, he is again given an opportunity to make positive moral choice when he becomes involved with a group of Jewish refugees. After many tribulations, he succeeds in making enough fuss so that most of them are evacuated from Yugoslavia, although, in the meantime, he is informed that Virginia—but not her child—has been killed in an air raid Guy takes this news in stride and continues with his work until he is recalled to England, a much wiser if not necessarily much happier man who has come to terms with a chaotic and morally ambivalent world. A brief epilogue set in 1951 finds him contentedly remarried and the envy of his once-dismissive contemporaries.

The Characters

Guy Crouchback is a largely autobiographical character whose personality and past reflect Evelyn Waugh’s awareness of what he was and what he wished to be. Both author and protagonist are the same age, and, like Waugh, Guy is divorced from his wife because of her flagrant infidelity. More important, they share much the same religious, political, and social ideas. Both are staunch Catholics, supporters of conservative politicians, and defenders of a class system based upon the assumption that the upper classes are superior examples of humanity. The most significant experiences Guy has in the army, such as fighting in the battle for Crete and serving on a mission to Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, are taken from Waugh’s military career, and many of the other characters in Sword of Honour are drawn from real-life acquaintances of the author.

To the extent that there are differences between protagonist and literary creator, they tend to reveal Waugh’s conception of the ideal social background for a person of his acquired—rather than inherited—beliefs. Waugh came from an eminently respectable but nevertheless thoroughly middle-class family with strong literary and artistic leanings, vague but definitely Protestant religious sentiments, and liberal if by no means radical political views. He rejected most of this heritage by converting to Catholicism and adopting very right-wing positions on most issues, and, in his later years, he often bemoaned the fact that he had not been born into the nobility. Guy Crouchback’s aristocratic Catholic family and secure position in society undoubtedly reflect Waugh’s dreams as to how he might bring his past into line with his present, and anyone interested in Waugh’s conception of himself should pay very close attention to the character of Sword of Honour’s protagonist.

This process of idealization carries over into the portrait of Guy’s father, who is depicted in a reverently uncritical manner that occasionally verges upon sheer sentimentality. A deeply religious Catholic, saintly friend to the less fortunate, and at all times perfect gentleman, Gervase Crouchback is a rock of assurance in Guy’s otherwise turbulent world. One would also be justified in assuming that he represents Waugh’s idea of the perfect father, given those feelings of rejection and lack of understanding he experienced in his relationship with his real father, which are so gently but clearly detailed in his autobiography A Little Learning (1964).

Most of the other characters in the Sword of Honour trilogy have some degree of correspondence to people Waugh met. His first biographer, Christopher Sykes, was also acquainted with many of them, and he offers a number of well-documented suggestions as to who was really who. The military men of higher rank and/or higher social standing can easily be matched up with their real-life counterparts: Ben Ritchie-Hook and Tommy Blackhouse are recognizable versions of the commanders of Waugh’s brigade and commando unit, respectively, and most of the officers who appear in Officers and Gentlemen’s account of the battle for Crete can be identified by consulting the corresponding section of the posthumously published The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976). Ivor Claire is an exception to this rule in functioning as a type—that of the stylish, dashing officer who proves to be hollow at the core in battle—of which Waugh saw all too many real examples by the end of the fighting in Crete.

It is in his portrayals of Sword of Honour’s less wellborn soldiers that Waugh makes use of more synthetic methods of character construction. The fact that Apthorpe, Trimmer, and Ludovic are never given first names, whereas their classmate in officer training, the thoroughly civilized Cambridge graduate Frank de Souza, is allotted this normal feature of individuality, is indicative of Waugh’s attitude toward the working and lower-middle classes. This is also made manifest in the way that Waugh often describes their behavior in terms of its typicality or normality for people from such backgrounds. Even Apthorpe, who is, to some extent, Guy’s friend as well as an utter fool, is finally disposed of in a manner that brands him a moral weakling; in the cases of Trimmer and Ludovic, Waugh draws an explicit connection between their inferior human qualities and their dubious social origins. Although this extreme social snobbery is partially masked by the number of humorous episodes in which Apthorpe, and to a lesser degree Trimmer, are involved, there is no doubt that Sword of Honour’s characters are ranked and judged based upon their position within the traditional English class system.

Since this system views women as dependents of their male consorts, it is not surprising that Sword of Honour offers little scope for the developmemt of its female characters. The only woman of consequence, Guy’s ex-and future wife, Virginia Troy, is sketched in vague general terms which emphasize her beauty and her flightiness, and indeed make it difficult to believe that she and Guy would ever have married once, let alone a second time. The other female characters fall into such familiar stereotypes as the dutiful wife and the social butterfly, and, even though Sword of Honour is focused upon the predominantly masculine occupation of warfare, its superficial treatment of women certainly detracts from its effectiveness as a realistic portrait of English society.

In conjunction with its similarly dismissive attitude toward men from the lower rungs of the social ladder, Sword of Honour’s approach to characterization clearly reveals its author’s dominant prejudices: If a character is worth describing well, it is because he—and only if it is a he—has lived up to the heritage of his genteel birth by becoming a mature and morally superior gentleman. It is an index of Waugh’s exceptional literary talent that even those repulsed by his attitudes have acknowledged his ability to make Guy Crouch back and his peers believable embodiments of virtues which, in a manner not unlike that of the Halberdiers’ fulfillment of their rearguard responsibilities on Crete, often seem an ineffectual if heroic resistance to the inexorable trends of modern life.

Critical Context

Sword of Honour is generally regarded as Waugh’s finest achievement in fiction. Having begun as the highly comic chronicler of gilded youth in such novels as Decline and Fall: An Illustrated Novelette (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), Waugh gradually introduced a more serious tone into his writing that culminated in the essentially tragic realism of Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945, 1960). Sword of Honour brings his humorous and serious sides into fruitful combination in way that, for the first time, enables him to deal with a broad range of characters and situations, and, as a result, to create a multilevel literary work that blends affecting personal drama with sweeping panoramas of social and historical events.

Unfortunately, this hard-won mastery of literary technique was not destined to be exercised again. Waugh’s deteriorating physical and mental health in the 1960’s forced him to turn his hand to the less demanding genres of autobiography, travel writing, and light fiction, and, by the time of his death in 1966, he had become a reclusive figure who occasionally emerged to sna at would-be interviewers. Despite the unfashionability of his religious, politcal, and social sentiments, however, his work continues to be respected by the balance of critical opinion, and there has been no sign of the radically negative reevaluation that often occurs after the death of a contemporary writer. Great cynic and reactionary though he was, Evelyn Waugh’s dissenting views regarding the value of progress have perhaps touched responsive chords in readers who have also experienced the painful transformation of youthful idealism into world-weary pragmatism.

Bibliography

Pryce-Jones, David, ed. Evelyn Waugh and His World, 1973.

Stannard, Martin, ed. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, 1984.

Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, 1975.

Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, 1976. Edited by Michael Davie.