Word: crouchback
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Captain Trimmer is just one of the odd fish that Evelyn Waugh takes whenever he lets down his nets. This novel is chiefly about officers who have always been gentlemen, particularly that "Christian gentleman,'' Guy Crouchback. It is every bit as good as Men at Arms, whose splendid characterizations and fine writing led many in 1952 to predict that its author had begun the best English fictional account of World War II. Waugh writes of the life and death of ruling-class commandomen with the authority of one who took part in raids on Bardia in Libya...
...Russo-German alliance, "constitute a whole." He has therefore scrapped his original plan for a trilogy to let these two books stand by themselves, though he plans to "follow the fortunes of the characters through the whole of their war" in later novels. Men at Arms began with Crouchback reading of the Russo-German alliance and rushing in "jubilation" to join a correct, old-line regiment. "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 ends, after the rout on Crete and the nearly simultaneous breakup of the Russo-German alliance, with the hero's "deflation." Crouchback finds himself "back after less than two years' pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor." In a last "symbolical act," however, Crouchback burns papers he had brought out from Crete which would have proved that his fellow aristocrat-that faultlessly bred International Equestrian Champion Ivor Claire, whom he had once thought...
...Regiment. Hero Guy Crouchback is a familiar Waugh character in that, dramatically speaking, he is not a hero at all. Like Waugh himself, Guy is a Roman Catholic romantic, but for the rest he is an older version of those earlier Waugh stooge-heroes whose very decency caused them to be trampled underfoot by hemen, clawed apart by harpies, robbed of their rights by double-dealers-and then trounced by Evelyn Waugh into the bargain. World War II finds Guy a dispossessed man in every sense, abandoned by a feckless wife, deprived of spiritual zest by isolation. Waugh is frank...