Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BATTLE (319 pp.)-Evelyn Waugh-Little, Brown...
...most accomplished contemporary stylist in the English language-sometime satirist, religious romantic and biographer -is also a social historian of sorts. With The End of the Battle, Evelyn Waugh completes a trilogy of novels about a segment of Britain in World War II. Neither as bouncy as Men at Arms nor as dissonant as Officers and Gentlemen, the third of the three is a blues for a bygone time...
...Waugh's hero. Guy Crouchback, the square and serious scion of an old landed Catholic family, joined the Halberdiers with shining purpose and an oath on the sword of Roger of Waybroke, saintly crusader of the 12th century. To Guy, the Nazi-Communist pact had seemed to simplify things: "The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle...
Both Guy's place and his personal battle grew increasingly ambiguous. The Halberdiers teemed with weird Waugh characters-from one-eyed, ruthless Brigadier Ritchie-Hook through Trimmer, an ex-hairdresser on the Aquitania. to the knowledgeable ass, Apthorpe, whose portable jakes provides Waugh with an outlet for numerous excursions into scatology. Hapless Guy inadvertently kills him at the end with the gift of a bottle of whisky when Apthorpe was suffering from fever...
Friends & Traitors. In Officers and Gentlemen the old Waugh savagery makes mincemeat of the Halberdiers. Trimmer, the cowardly leader of a commando raid that was organized for publicity purposes, is puffed into a phony hero and sent on a tour of factories to bolster civilian mo rale. Guy and a group of fellow commandos are sent on an operation in Crete, where three of them desert (including the commanding officer), and one Waugh original known as Ludovic murders two of his comrades-in-arms...