Word: regiment
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...Marines' own traditional philosophy of battle : throwing the big punch, subjecting an enemy to constant pressure, risking big initial casualties in violent assault rather than submitting to a long, wearing attrition. Second Lieut. Shepherd, U.S.M.C., went into action as a platoon leader with the 5th Marine Regiment at Belleau Wood, was hit in the neck by a machine-gun slug, fought on with his men for three days and was hit again before he finally went to the rear...
...World War II he proved his capacity for high command as the Marines fought their way up the Central Pacific amid the deadly crash of island war: Tarawa. Saipan, Iwo Jima, Peleliu. Shepherd whipped the 9th Marine Regiment into combat shape, went ashore at Cape Gloucester as assistant commander of the famed First Division. He invaded Guam at the head of the First Provisional Marine Brigade. In the last months of the war, he fought 82 days across Okinawa with his last and biggest command, the Sixth Marine Division. After the war, Shepherd moved on to China, commanded the Marines...
...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...
...joins a regiment named the Halberdiers, to be trained as an officer. To him, as to Waugh (who was himself a captain in the Royal Horse Guards), the Halberdiers are a dream come true. They embody all the sentiments of which Guy was starved in the prewar world. Tradition, esprit de corps, ritual and courtesy are combined with high efficiency and discipline. The Halberdiers still loyally toast their Colonel-in-Chief, the Grand Duchess Elena of Russia, who lives "in a bed-sitting-room at Nice.'' They take "peculiar pride" in accepting whatever recruits are sent to them...
...most surprising feats in Men at Arms is the way Waugh, too, throws open the sacred doors of the Halberdier mess to all sorts and conditions of men, making the regiment a symbol of the church militant in which he believes. Apart from Guy, none of the newer officers is a devout man, and most of them are intellectual mediocrities at best. But to Waugh -and to the reader, after Waugh has waved his magic wand of characterization -mediocrity seems not only a human condition but a fascinating one. The only trouble with it is that it is incapable...