Word: waugh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novel, the first volume of a trilogy about World War II, Waugh broadens and deepens the scope of this experiment. Reading Men at Arms is like hearing a full keyboard used by a pianist who has hitherto confined himself to a single octave. Waugh is fully alive to the fact that no modern war is just a soldier's war. The drawing rooms, kitchens and clubs of the home front interest him just as much as the barracks and the tents. Furthermore, his interest in the battles is tightly linked with his interest in the cause for which they...
...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...
...Died. Boastful, untruthful, utterly incompetent, Apthorpe dies of fever in a West African hospital. But it is only when he is on his deathbed, "staring at the sun-blinds with his hands empty on the counterpane," that the reader grasps the true nature of Waugh's creation. Captain Apthorpe is Shakespeare's Falstaff, perfectly brought up-to-date, but with his roots set firmly in the historic past. And it is Brigadier Ritchie-Hook who drives him to his death, much as King Henry V impatiently rid his army of "that stuff'd cloakbag of guts...