Arguably: Selected Essays (43 page)

Thus, the
summa
of Waugh’s effort is probably rightly held to be the wartime trilogy that he began to compose in 1951 and completed a decade later. Collectively titled
Sword of Honour
, this consists of
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen
, and
Unconditional Surrender
or (in the U.S. edition)
The End of the Battle
. Unlike many or most of Waugh’s “entertainments” (to which I would add some of the imperishable “original sin” short stories, including “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing”), this trilogy cannot be read at a sitting. Nor do very many of its passages commit themselves virtually to memory, like the descriptions of William Boot’s telegraphese in
Scoop
, or the Welsh silver band in
Decline and Fall
. I postponed re-reading it with definite anticipation, which wasn’t enough by itself to account for my disappointment.

Of course there is an ancient English Catholic family, with an endangered English country house. The names—Crouchback for the family and Broome for the house—are well up to Waugh’s standard. War is coming, and the young Crouchback hears the call of the bugle. But—and this makes him nearly unique in modern English writing—he is not really convinced of the justice of his country’s cause. Britain is potentially allied with communism against not just Nazism but Christendom. Guy Crouchback, we learn, is quite reconciled to fascism in Italy, and indifferent to the fate of Czechoslovakia. He is only momentarily cheered by the news of the Nazi-Soviet pact: “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.”

With these divided loyalties he prays at the shrine of a Crusader knight and sets off to enlist. (“Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last Mass for the last Pope in a catacomb at the end of the world.”) Yet, starting out in well-trodden territory, we find ourselves kept within its bounds. The image of the desolate shrine is from the closing pages of
Brideshead
. Crouchback’s disastrous choice of a wife, and her subsequent desertion of him, are very like Waugh’s own experience—and reminiscent of the agony faced by Tony Last in
A Handful of Dust
. Arthur Box-Bender’s fatuous complacency about the Nazis is lifted straight from Rex Mottram’s in
Brideshead
(“The Germans are short of almost every industrial essential. As soon as they realize that Mr. Hitler’s bluff has been called, we shan’t hear much more of Mr. Hitler”), and in both cases the bluster is put into the mouth of a pro-Churchill Tory politician. Having joined his regiment, Guy begins to experience “something he had missed in boyhood, a happy adolescence,” which is almost precisely what Charles Ryder says of his affair with Sebastian Flyte. Guy’s fellow officer Sarum-Smith makes exactly the calculation about wartime service—that it will do him good when the time comes to return to life in business—that Hooper announces in
Brideshead
. Guy compares his love for and disillusionment with the army to a marriage, exactly as Ryder does. And this is all in the first eighty pages or so of
Men at Arms
. In most of the instances I have cited, the preceding books phrased it better.

In
Brideshead
, Ryder reflects,

Here my last love died … as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom.

In
Sword of Honour
, Crouchback broods,

Those days of lameness, he realized much later, were his honeymoon, the full consummation of his love of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. After them came domestic routine, much loyalty and affection, many good things shared, but intervening and overlaying them all the multitudinous, sad little discoveries of marriage, familiarity, annoyance, imperfections noted, discord. Meanwhile it was sweet to wake and to lie on in bed; the spirit of the Corps lay on beside him: to ring the bell; it was in the service of his unseen bride.

The first of the dawn thoughts of these two English soldiers is latently tragic, whereas the second is mostly banal (and gives rise to the suspicion that Waugh did not truly recall the first even while he was carpentering the second).

The cause of this depression in the narrator, and perhaps of the routine and repetition in the author’s prose, is disclosed quite early on. Guy sits in a warm officers’ mess, far, “immeasurably far, from the frontier of Christendom where the great battle had been fought and lost; from those secret forests where the trains were, even then, while the Halberdiers and their guests sat bemused by wine and harmony, rolling east and west with their doomed loads.” Waugh’s meaning soon becomes clear: “England had declared war to defend the independence of Poland. Now that country had quite disappeared and the two strongest states in the world guaranteed her extinction.” This is Waugh the Catholic pessimist as well as (not quite the same thing) Waugh the Catholic reactionary. Note also that the existence of the United States as a great power is not acknowledged even latently. Indeed, almost the only appearance made by America in this wartime trilogy is in the absurd and irritating person of “The Loot”—an opprobrious nickname for an affected and obsequious and somewhat shady American officer named Lieutenant Padfield—and of three disgusting Stateside reporters, Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan. The depiction of this vile trio is not a patch on the portrait of revolting journalists that appears in
Scoop
. And one might sadly observe that here Waugh’s high facility for laughable yet plausible names seems to have deserted him in favor of rank crudity.

On re-reading, it also struck me as unwise for Waugh to include some of the same people and places and names—Julia Stitch, Marchmain House, the
Daily Beast
—that featured in his earlier, more fanciful works.
Sword of Honour
follows “real” historical events, from however idiosyncratic a perspective, and it is distracting to see stage characters winking from behind such imposing scenery. Indeed, it undermines the chief virtue of the trilogy, which is its rigorous portrayal of the splendors and miseries of the great calling of arms. Waugh’s account of the battle for Crete, with its stark and humiliating depiction of the British army in shabby, demoralized, cowardly retreat, is one of the great passages of wartime prose. This, one says to oneself, is what defeat and shame must really have felt like. Many whiskered veterans have told me that the following is
exactly
how the return to barracks and the report to duty appeared to them:

Guy saluted, turned about and departed only very slightly disconcerted. This was the classic pattern of army life as he had learned it, the vacuum, the spasm, the precipitation, and with it all the peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality.

Nor did Waugh skimp on the farcical and capricious elements that are inseparable from warfare. Sometimes the humor is cruel; people die at random and in pointless ways. The figure of Guy’s brother officer Apthorpe, at once pompous and pitiable, is beautifully drawn, even if it follows the outline of Captain Grimes (in
Decline and Fall
) a little too faithfully. Then there are serio-comic set pieces. At a critical moment one of Guy’s soldiers asks for permission to go on leave, so that he can take part in a competition.

“Competition for what, Shanks?”

“The slow valse, sir. We’ve practiced together three years now. We won at Salford last year. We’ll win at Blackpool, sir, I know we will. And I’ll be back in the two days, honest, sir.”

“Shanks, do you realize that France has fallen? That there is every likelihood of the invasion of England? That the whole railway system of the country is disorganized for the Dunkirk men? That our brigade is on two hours’ notice for active service? Do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then how can you come to me with this absurd application?”

“But, sir, we’ve been practicing three years. We got a first at Salford last year. I can’t give up now, sir.”

“Request dismissed, sergeant-major.”

In accordance with custom (sergeant-major) Rawkes had been waiting within view in case the applicant for a private interview attempted personal violence on his officer … And Guy remained to wonder: was this the already-advertised spirit of Dunkirk? He rather thought it was.

In the “entertainments,” however often one reads them, there is always a detail that leaps out as if for the first time. (In
Decline and Fall
applicants to an agency that supplies prep-school teachers are instructed to furnish a photograph “if considered advisable.” In
Scoop
, Lord Copper is searching for an example of the lowliest among his newspaper’s staff, and after a pause announces that he is “accessible to the humblest … book reviewer.”) With
Sword of Honour
, despite its flashes (“Guy felt no resentment; he was a good loser—at any rate an experienced one”), there are slower buildups, larger tracts, and, it must be said, many longueurs. Graham Greene once wrote that the opening pages of
Brideshead
seem lengthy in the memory but are brilliantly brief when, so to speak, revisited. The reverse is the case here, and that is because the state of Guy Crouchback’s soul is insufficiently interesting to merit the introspection it receives. We may assume that he is Waugh (he is given the same day, month, and year of birth), and his sense of despair really does not take very long to elaborate. He believes that the Second World War has made his country into a corrupt, collectivized state at home and an accomplice in Bolshevism and atheism abroad. For him there has been no “Finest Hour.” The very title of the trilogy is sarcastic: The only sword in the story (apart from the ancient Crusader blade next to which Guy prays) is the one made on the orders of King George VI, to be presented to Stalin in recognition of the gallantry of Soviet resistance. This, and what it represents, is to Guy a sword of dishonor. He runs into Box-Bender and is told,

“Everything is going merrily on the eastern front.”

“Merrily?”

“Wait for the nine o’clock news. You’ll hear something then. Uncle Joe’s fairly got them on the run. I shouldn’t much care to be one of his prisoners.”

Here Waugh condenses a vast contempt into a small space. But his revenge on Box-Bender (whose prisoner-of-war son elects to become a Catholic monk) seems all the pettier for that. The conversion to Rome of Guy’s once and future wife, Virginia, is likewise mawkish and artificial, and the ludicrous character of his uncle Peregrine, obsessed with family genealogy and religious arcana, is a composite of many previous figures of fun. Only in the clever, lethal way in which he caricatured certain Anthony Blunt-like persons in the Foreign Office and the intelligence services did Waugh really succeed in landing a blow on the forces he hated.

In his private journal for February of 1944 Waugh wrote,

The battle at Nettuno looks unpromising. It is hard to be fighting against Rome. We bombed Castel Gandolfo. The Russians now propose a partition of East Prussia.
It is a fact that the Germans now represent Europe against the world
. [Italics added]

The long and didactic closing stages of
Sword of Honour
are amazingly blatant in the utterance they give to this rather unutterable thought. Guy Crouchback regards the Yugoslav partisans as mere ciphers for Stalin, sympathizes with the local Fascists, and admires the discipline of the German occupiers. We know from many published memoirs that Waugh himself was eventually removed from this theater of operations for precisely that sort of insubordination. We also know that his first writerly trip after the German surrender was to observe the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He left the city after only two days, “finding the reality tedious,” in the words of his biographer Selina Hastings. So it is slightly unsettling to find Guy Crouchback performing an act of mercy and piety, which his creator never even attempted. In a protracted and sentimental episode at the close of
Sword of Honour
he devotes himself to the rescue of a group of displaced Jews, and persists in this quixotic policy despite every variety of British official discouragement. The Jews themselves are never represented except as extras—as Guy’s rather bedraggled objects of charity. There isn’t any color or life or dignity to them. Is it then mistaken for one to suggest that they are included as a makeweight, or as a clumsy atonement many years later for Waugh’s actual views at the time? Whatever may be the case, the passage is one of the most bogus and leaden things he ever wrote, fully materializing Orwell’s earlier misgivings. And in this instance it is the suspect politics that directly occasion and condition the bad writing—which is to say, they negate the whole genius of Waugh in the first place.