A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

by David Cliffe

An Introduction to Section 2 : Officers and Gentlemen

1. The Story and the Major Theme

Officers and Gentlemen is the second book of the trilogy. It first appeared in 1955, three years after its predecessor. Critics immediately noticed its more sombre tone, which is partly attributable to the absence of Apthorpe. They also admired the awesome account of the Battle of Crete, an account which did not soften the debacle which that struggle became. It did not shirk the utter inadequacy of the British forces under pressure.

It also continued the story of the idealist Guy Crouchback as he subsides from an already muted sense of meaningful commitment into disillusion. After he has returned from West Africa in disgrace, he is rescued by the Prime Minister’s interest in the activities of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, whose actions had unfairly embroiled Guy. Churchill approves of men of action and insists on their employment. Guy is attached to a Commando and goes to Scotland for training; he is pleased to find many acquaintances already settled there. The commandos do their training for specialist raids on the tiny Scottish island of Mugg, whose owner is interested in getting their help for the extensive dynamiting of his property. Here Guy again meets Trimmer, who now calls himself Ali McTavish and is a lieutenant in a Scottish regiment, and makes the acquaintance of the elegant Ivor Claire, who seems to him to be the epitome of the English officer. While in Glasgow on leave, Trimmer meets and makes love to Virginia Troy, Guy’s ex-wife.

Guy’s Commando is sent to the Middle East by way of South Africa. In Egypt they wait in growing demoralisation while the authorities decide what to do with them. Guy’s brigade major, Hound, is a man for whom he has no respect. Another oddity is one of the brigade’s non-commissioned officers, Corporal-Major Ludovic, who writes up his journal every day with elevated and obscure thoughts (which are later to be published). In Alexandria Guy again meets Mrs Julia Stitch, a socialite fixer and hostess, who is a friend of the Commander-in-Chief’s.

In the meantime, back home, Trimmer is set up with an easy task which has the intention of showing the commandos in a good light. He and his platoon raid the coast of France (by accident) and destroy a stretch of railway line. This fact, a welcome piece of British success, is blazoned across the newspapers and Trimmer is forced to travel around Britain as a hero, accompanied by a most unwilling Virginia. He is presented as a people’s hero to American newspapermen.

The Commandos are sent to Crete in the expectation of taking the offensive but quickly realise that the situation is hopeless. They are immediately ordered to protect the evacuation of the troops already there. Guy is appalled by what he sees as cowardice and rampant defeatism all around him, though the unopposed presence of German dive-bombers in the daytime is enough to show why soldiers have become a self-serving rabble. Major Hound is quickly reduced to abject terror and deserts his post, as does Ludovic. When these two men meet, it is soon clear that Ludovic is the stronger man. At his post, Guy is unable to stem the tide of inefficiency and disorder but has the satisfaction of lining up temporarily with the Halberdiers, who alone maintain organised and rational standards of soldiership.

The order comes that the Commandos are to see the other troops safely evacuated and then surrender, an outcome which throws Ivor Claire into dejection. Guy seizes the chance to escape in a small boat with a sapper sergeant and Corporal-Major Ludovic, who has mysteriously lost Hound. Guy first takes the precaution of inviting his section along too, but they refuse. During the journey, which becomes a horror owing to the lack of water, Guy has a distinct impression that Ludovic throws the sapper overboard because of his dangerous insanity. Ludovic finally carries Guy ashore in Egypt.

This section of the book ends with Guy recovering in Alexandria under Julia Stitch’s ministrations. She tells him that the Commando force has been disbanded and that Claire had also escaped from Crete but has quickly departed for India. She tries to make Claire’s escape seem regular, but Guy realises that Claire must have disobeyed specific orders. He has the evidence in his own notebook. But when he hears that Britain is now openly welcoming a new ally in the shape of the atheistic empire of Soviet Russia, he knows that reality has shattered all his illusions. He decides that Claire’s misdemeanour counts for little in such a world and burns the notebook. He gives Julia a packet with the identity disc of a dead soldier for dispatch to the Commander-in-Chief’s office, but she thinks it is the notebook that contains evidence of Claire’s delinquency and disposes of it.

The humour that bubbled up almost continuously in MA is much muted in this OG section of SH. The war has been truly joined, soldiers and civilians are dying, the German advance seems to be that of a juggernaut, and reality is crushing Guy’s idealism and boyish enthusiasm. There is no doubt that OG is a more sombre read, but the canvas is still wide and varied. We see civilian life in London and at Matchet, we are guided through the military defence of the coast and Commando training in Scotland (and elsewhere) before experiencing the longueurs and rigours of soldiership in Egypt and Crete. The depiction of the evacuation of Crete is a miracle of description and presentation. But, as before, the story is really Guy’s, and we know that at the end of the novel he has lost all his illusions about the glorious nature of Britain’s stand for Christian values and human decency. When OG was first published, Evelyn Waugh said that the sequence was now finished, and there is a sense in which Guy’s story is completed and he has come full circle; but Waugh quickly realised that too many loose ends remained and that Guy’s history could not end in the middle of the war, in 1941. He himself had a quiverful of experiences in World War II yet to draw upon, and a third novel remained to be written.

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2. Waugh, Crouchback and Crete

This section has been withdrawn. I am rewriting it in the light of recent research, especially that by Professor Donat Gallagher, who has made it clear that the situation in Crete at the time of the evacuation was very different from the scenario presented by previous writers, including myself. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by this hiatus.

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3. Officers and Gentlemen and Sword of Honour

Waugh made a number of excisions in his recension. The chief ones are :

1. The elimination of the names of many officers and non-commissioned officers in the Commandos. In particular he almost entirely gets rid of Colonel Prentice of B Commando, who was based on a real colonel named Pedder, a man famous for his ferocious temper and impatience with any slackness whatsoever. He prescribed exhaustive and exhausting training which made his men rebellious, and it is generally believed that, in a successful assault in Syria a few weeks after Crete, he was shot in the back by one of his own men.
2. The interlude in South Africa and the long journey to Egypt are much cut down as contributing very little to the development of the story.
3. An episode contemptuous of the fighting qualities of the Egyptian army is thankfully missing. In these days it comes across as racially bigoted.
4. In SH Guy does not have an encounter with a man with an impossibly affected voice whom he suspects at first of being a German spy and then of being a private disguising himself as an officer in order to get a lift to port.
5. Guy does not have the company of the Greek General Miltiades on the road to Sphakia.
6. A few sentences which indicate Hound’s failing grasp are missing, but there are plenty which remain.
7. EW cut out a remarkable sentence which showed that he had muddled Guy’s situation with his own, stating that Guy was to have a day in which he would resign an immeasurable part of his manhood.
8. Ludovic, in talking about Hound, is not given the sinister sentence ‘Oh yes, sir. I was with him until - as long as he needed me, sir.’

There are also a few missing sentences which remove gobbets of information about other matters (e.g. Kerstie Kilbannock’s past, and Guy’s intelligence exercises with children’s coloured inks). I have of course indicated all the major and many minor cuts in the Companion.