A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

by David Cliffe

An Introduction to Section 1 : Men at Arms

1. The Story and the Major Theme

Men at Arms is the first book of the sequence of three. Its story is quite easy to encapsulate. Guy Crouchback, an emigré English aristocrat, divorced and lonely and living in Italy, is galvanised by news of impending war to return to Britain in order to join up in the struggle against malevolent dictatorships, even though he is 36 years old. Through good luck he joins a traditional regiment, the Halberdiers, where eventually he secures a commission as the Captain of a company. His career is dogged by two men : Apthorpe, an apparently efficient officer who slowly goes off the rails, and the Brigadier, Ritchie-Hook, whose philosophy is to meet the enemy head-on in all circumstances. Apthorpe fascinates Guy to the extent that he willingly joins in a farcical and unsuccessful campaign to preserve Apthorpe’s mobile latrine from being commandeered by the Brigadier. Ritchie-Hook organises a raid on the African coast with Guy as leader and then secretly takes part in it; his action involves Guy in disgrace when the Brigadier is wounded. This raid is part of the totally unsuccessful attempt to secure Dakar for the Free French in 1940. As the ailing Apthorpe lies in hospital in Freetown, Guy brings him a forbidden bottle of whisky which kills him. The book ends with Guy being sent home in further official disgrace, though all his colleagues admire him.

As even that brief summary will indicate, there are moments of high comedy and of tiresomely thwarted action. In this way Waugh captures first the mood of a period which was known as the Phony War and then the time of crisis and imminent danger which succeeded it. Britain seemed utterly unready to meet the challenge posed by the best-prepared and commanded army in Europe. The Halberdiers take ages to get a brigade together and even then it is deficient; they do not fight in Europe, and they are prevented by fearful leadership from fighting in Africa. The comedy merely reinforces the inadequacy of the British response.

Critics and readers found this scheme for the book difficult to recognise as suitable for a war novel. After all, Dunkirk becomes merely a side-show and the Battle of Britain a shadowy presence; it may seem strange that they do not figure much in this novel of the first year of the war. The comedy can seem irrelevant to the issues which were actually in play at the time the novel is set.

The fact is that Waugh did not intend a massive and detailed exposition of leadership in war or of the actual day-to-day actions of soldiers, though they are of course touched upon as required (usually with ironical intent). Instead he is working out a grand plan which still has a long way to go by the time Men at Arms finishes : the reclamation of an individual soul - Guy’s. Guy at the opening of the novel is a shrivelled, unattached man. His faith is enough to inform his opinions but not his life. Even priests wonder at his lonely, cold chastity. He then hopes to rekindle his enthusiasm, to find a cause to which he can devote himself entirely, by enlisting with the Halberdiers in the fight against the atheistic blocs of Europe, and at first finds the regiment and his new colleagues admirable and lovable; but his zeal is soon shaken when Britain does not declare war on the Soviets though they invaded Poland alongside Germany. He nevertheless retains his romantic illusions throughout his training and the raid on the African coast, though in his disgrace he is once again alone at the end of the book. He has failed to find the whole-hearted companionship and the unsullied cause which seemed to be promised him when he joined up.

It is clear then that the novel ends with Guy as far from salvation or, at least, from true and active faith, as he was at the beginning. How his career and his character develop is the story of the next book in the sequence, Officers and Gentlemen. There are promising stepping stones already laid down in Men at Arms : he has met his wife Virginia again (and been rebuffed by her), his father is a rock of innocent sanity in his retirement apartment in Matchet, and several characters of some later importance - Trimmer and Blackhouse especially - have been introduced. And surely Guy must get some real action some time.

You may wonder why you should read such a book, which seems to have a recondite and unattractive main theme and an inadequate evocation of the war. The first reason to read it is that it is not an inadequate evocation of the war. The preparations (forced, muddled and ill-advised as they are) are given with superb skill, a source of both laughter and amazement. Waugh’s descriptions capture those early months of the war with great clarity. Secondly, the book is very funny. Character and incident are delineated with immense skill and humour. I did not fully realise this until I read Men at Arms again in preparation for this website. I spent much of the time chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter. The passages without much humour in them are nevertheless important as sources of evocative background, something Waugh was always able to create in both his novels and his travel books. Waugh himself in later life often said he found Men at Arms tedious and long-winded : I on the contrary could have done with another hundred pages of it.

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2. Men at Arms and Sword of Honour

There are small but significant differences between Men at Arms and the first section of Sword of Honour that it became. In my Companion I give the important divergences. For the sake of convenience I note them here.

1. Guy is made less of a daydreamer, less of a man influenced by silly, romantic ideas of heroism and soldiership. He is also made less liable to make foolish military judgments.
2. Mr Crouchback is made less penurious. The idea behind this is to prevent him from being construed as either foolishly unconcerned or culpably spendthrift in the management of his fortunes and his estate. Later in the novel, he proves indeed to have been rather astute.
3. The extent of Mr Goodall’s fixation with Catholic genealogy is reduced so that he does not appear to be more knowledgable about Guy’s ancestry than Guy himself.
4. Air Marshal Beech does not recite his ditty about Elinor Glyn.
5. Guy and the other officers are not introduced by Brigadier Ritchie-Hook to the game of bingo.

Among smaller changes, Waugh redistributes a number of speeches. In particular, some of the speeches attributed to Trimmer in MA are given to de Souza in SH. The effect is wholly laudable as the two men are thereby more easily differentiated, Trimmer losing any sense of a wide education or a nature either ironical or social, and so becoming less suitable as a companion for his fellow-officers. He becomes more fully what he was always intended to be, a fixer and a wanderer who seizes the main chance wherever he happens to be. De Souza is conversely a more solid figure of apt intelligence and self-contained scepticism but also a man with a deeply ingrained political agenda that is not wholly revealed by the end of this first section of SH.