A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

Chapter Four

Apthorpe Immolatus

1

173 Apthorpe Immolatus
Immolatus (Latin) means sacrificed, ritually offered to the gods. Something precious is always offered.

173 Nine weeks of ‘flap’
This chimes in with EW’s own experience at this time. A flap is a state of panic.

173 terra incognita
i.e. unknown land (Latin). This phrase was used by map-makers when they wished to indicate that they had no information about an area they wanted to include on a map or chart.

173 Gare Maritime
the railway station at Calais which received boat-trains from Dover or despatched them there

Guy thinks of three events he associates with the city of Calais :

173 Mary Tudor
Queen Mary I of England (1516-1558, queen from 1553), daughter of Henry VIII, is perhaps most famous for attempting violently to re-establish Catholicism in the country. Here Guy is thinking of her comment on hearing that the English had lost Calais to the French and with it their last possession on mainland Europe (1558) : When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart (usually given as ‘Calais’ engraved on my heart). She died a few months later.

173 Beau Brummell
George Bryan Brummell (1778-1840) was an English dandy famous for his friendship with the Prince of Wales (Prince Regent from 1811 and King George IV from 1820 to 1830). Brummell was the unquestioned leader of fashion at the beginning of the 19th century until he quarrelled with the Prince Regent in 1812 and soon afterwards found himself in debt. In 1816 he fled to Calais to escape his creditors. There and later in Caen he lived in increasing poverty and squalor until his death.

173 Rodin’s Burghers
The French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was asked in 1884 to create a memorial to commemorate the sacrifice of the six burghers of Calais, a group statue he completed in 1895. It shows the townsmen in a sorry state awaiting execution at the command of the English king Edward III. The king had demanded this sacrifice as a condition for not ravaging the town, which had surrendered only after a siege lasting a year. Edward was persuaded by his queen Philippa of Hainault to forgive the burghers. The intention of the people who commissioned the statue was to honour the burghers, who had volunteered to sacrifice themselves; the English, on the other hand, celebrated the queen’s compassion and the king’s mercy when they ordered a bronze casting of the group to be erected in the garden of the Houses of Parliament in London in 1913.

173 anti-tank rifles
This weapon was obviously coming to be considered of prime importance. Very soon every platoon in the British army was to be issued with an anti-tank rifle. At this stage in the war it was the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, a five-shot bolt action weapon which was fairly successful at dealing with older types of tanks. It proved to be useless against modern Panzers, however, and by 1942 was being replaced by the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) weapon, Britain’s answer to the American bazooka.

174 None had deserted but most were lost.
Perhaps the full history behind the utter confusion which was the British Expeditionary Force in France, under extreme pressure from the Germans, has still to be written. When soldiers did not know which battalion they were in, things were in a parlous state. They operated by a system of personal loyalty to one officer, it seems - or so EW is indicating.

175 Fifth columnists
During the Spanish Civil War, General Emilio Mola, who led the Nationalist insurgents advancing on Madrid from the north while Franco’s Army of Africa came up from the south, announced that not only had he four columns of troops besieging Madrid but also a fifth column (i.e. of supporters and saboteurs) inside the city itself. The term fifth column struck the western imagination as much as it did his republican opponents, both of whom became abnormally obsessive in times of danger about rooting out non-existent enemies in their midst.

175 identity cards
As Guy says, these were issued in Britain with the outbreak of war in 1939. They were produced in October as a direct consequence of an enumeration survey fortuitously conducted in September for the aborted 1941 General Census. The identity card was a small document containing one’s name, address and National Registration number, which had six or seven digits, and it had to be carried everywhere you went. Identity cards were abandoned in February 1952 though since then there have been several half-hearted moves to revive them, if only to attempt to control illegal immigration. Recent experiences with terrorism have given the idea a stronger profile in Britain : the government issued its proposals for the reintroduction of identity cards in early July 2002 and with greater detail in November 2003. Their exact form - or indeed whether they have any certain usefulness - has still to be decided.

175 fire-picket and an anti-parachute platoon
At this time of national emergency many panicky orders were issued from the War Office in London and by higher authorities of all kinds. Some of them were contradictory, but this contradiction seems to be manufactured by de Souza. A fire-picket was a group of soldiers detailed to keep a lookout for fire which they would then put out.

176 ‘Roll out the barrel’; ‘There are rats ...’; ‘We’ll hang out the washing ...’
Three famous army songs. The first two are from World War I and are famously expressive of the British soldier’s jaundiced view of war and his officers, as Guy and de Souza go on to note.

176 ‘That sounds a little out of date at the moment’
Because the allied forces are very far from being able to attack the Siegfried Line, and are indeed on the point of collapse in the face of the German advance.

176 A drawing of the last war .. a sort of sham Goya
I have not identified this drawing yet but I too have seen a copy of it somewhere.
Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), the Spanish painter, is mentioned because he drew and painted pictures of startlingly real horror, some of them betraying a mind fixated too much on unpleasantness for the taste of many art-lovers.

177 Pembroke Dock
Pembroke is on the western edge of Wales, overlooking the Irish Sea. Guy’s question about going to Calais therefore seems as foolish as Colonel Tickeridge deems it but in fact strange departure points were all too common in World War II, generally owing to the fears of the authorities that there was danger awaiting the troops at sea.

177 they’ve chucked in at Calais
i.e. the British troops have surrendered at Calais. This happened on 26th May 1940.

177 Tony Box-Bender’s regiment was at Calais.
Guy’s nephew Tony was in the Greenjackets, which had been sent to hold up the German advance into Calais. They did this with skill and courage for three days before their commander was forced to surrender his forces.

2

178 too well to think of them giving themselves up
Mr Crouchback still has older ideas of gallantry in fighting. He might expect a British regiment to fight to the last man; but in fact this only happened where their enemies were intent on mercilessly killing all the men anyway.

178 bona mors
i.e. a good death (Latin). It is a measure of how far Mr Crouchback thinks differently from the generality of men and women that he can so treat the conjectural death of his only grandson. This knowledge prepares us for the imparting of the crucial piece of advice about quantitative judgments that he later gives Guy.

178 now our country is quite alone and I feel that that is good for us.
Mr Crouchback gives expression to the kind of sentiment which many Englishmen might feel; in their case they would be betraying pride in themselves and contempt for more unfortunate races. But his view is typically different from theirs : he ends by saying that Britain has had quarrels with its allies which I believe were our own fault. So Mr Crouchback sees the future as a time for penance and rigour, almost a period of expiation for past sins, and that is why he feels it holds experiences that will be good for Britain. Not many would have shared that view.

179 the day the Germans marched into Paris
i.e. 14th June 1940

179 one damned thing after another
A saying attributed to one or other of two Americans, Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), the author of The Philistine, and the reporter Frank Ward O’Malley (1875-1932). It gained popularity in the twenties and thirties to express the consciousness of most people that after World War I things steadily got worse. In 1927 there was even a successful revue called One Dam’ Thing After Another which contained songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

179 E.S.O.
Embarkation Staff Officer, the man in charge of seeing the troops safely onto the appropriate ships

180 the Air Force had been idle at Dunkirk
This charge was not only promoted by the Germans as a form of propaganda but was spontaneously and widely held by the British soldiers themselves. They endured up to four days of strafing and bombing on the beaches of Dunkirk with very little obvious intervention by the RAF. Explanations such as that offered here cut little ice with the men. The major explanation for the apparent lack of protection may be that there were no safe airfields left in northern France and the fighters could not operate for long periods from Britain.

180 a German army had landed in Limerick
Limerick is in Ireland. A German army had done no such thing, but it was a long-lasting fear of both the Irish and British governments that it would soon do so. There were very secret talks between the two governments about their joint response to such an invasion.
The reason why the Germans did not land in Ireland may be to do with the difficulty of crossing the ocean with sufficient numbers of soldiers in the face of the might of the Royal Navy and the growing strength of the Royal Air Force. The invasion of Britain itself might be accounted as easier to achieve.

181 militiamen
i.e. not the regular professional soldiers. EW is thinking of the conscripted men, though militiamen used to be the volunteer reservists.

181 ‘spirit of Dunkirk’
This was a kind of national determination to unite, to help others in worse condition than oneself, to put aside petty and even not-so-petty differences, to fight resolutely to the end, and to endure whatever might befall. It also embraced a resolution to behave as if everything was as normal as possible. This spirit seems to have arisen as an obstinate refusal to admit that things were bad.

181 ‘in the hulks’
De Souza is recalling the opening chapters of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, where Magwitch and other convicts are locked up in prison ships moored permanently in the Thames Estuary. The Halberdiers’ period in the ships seems to him to have the same sense of endless purposelessness as did the sentences imposed on Dickens’s convicts.

182 Lyon King of Arms ... Garter King of Arms
Apthorpe probably chose this subject because he knew it would not be accepted. He could hardly have chosen a more recondite one for the generality of soldiers.
These two officials are leading figures in heraldic and genealogical work. The Lord Lyon King of Arms presides over the Scottish Court of Chivalry in Edinburgh; the Garter King of Arms is one of three who do the same in the College of Arms in London. Among other things they establish the rights to arms of individuals in their countries, whether through birth, pedigree or grant.

182 ‘Court Life at St Petersburg’
Since St Petersburg had been renamed after the Russian Revolutions (first Petrograd and then Leningrad), this court life flourished before World War I, more than 25 years previously. (In 1991 this old name was restored to the city.)

183 ‘Chemical Warfare (Offensive)’
Considerable secrecy (or at least ignorance) clouds the subject of British chemical and biological preparations for war from 1939 to 1945. The department is known to have existed and to have produced weapons but none of them were, it seems, ever used.
Quite what can be in this consignment on the quay remains a mystery. It raises questions about what might have been done to combat a German invasion of Ireland.

183 two miles of cliff to defend
in Cornwall, as it turns out

184 Intelligence Officer
EW makes this I.O. a particularly unintelligent and ignorant young man. He had little respect for the position of Intelligence Officer in the army, which makes ironic his own appointment as one later in the war.

184 Local Defence Volunteers
These are the precursors of the Home Guard, the Dad’s Army of television fame. On 14th May 1940 Sir Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, broadcast a message asking for volunteers for the L.D.V. Within the first month 750,000 men had volunteered, and by the end of June 1940 the total number of volunteers was over one million. On 23rd August 1940 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, changed the name of the L.D.V. to the Home Guard.

185 arsenical smoke
Arsenic is not a recognised means of achieving the mass poisoning of soldiers and no country has used it as an agent of chemical warfare.

3

185 Another series of jolts
EW cuts four pages of MA from the very beginning of Section 3, before these words occur. The missing extract introduces two officers of the Loamshire Regiment whom Guy suspects of being fifth columnists because he has not been warned that they will be arriving. He even details Sergeant Major Rawkes to cover them surreptitiously with a Bren gun while he makes enquiries. It all turns out to be yet another failure of duty by Sarum-Smith. On adjusting the novel, EW obviously thought that Guy behaves too foolishly for the passage to survive into SH. For those interested in reading it, here is the passage :

At the end of August Guy was sitting in his company office in the hotel when two captains of a county regiment entered and saluted.
‘We’re A Company, 5th Loamshires.’
‘Good morning. What can I do for you?’
‘You’re expecting us, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘We’ve come to take over from you.’
‘First I’ve beard of it.’
‘Damn. I suppose we’ve come to the wrong place again. You aren’t D Company, 2nd Halberdiers?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all right then. I expect the orders will get through in time. My chaps are due to arrive this afternoon. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind showing us round?’
For weeks they had waited for fifth columnists. Here they were at last.
There was a field telephone, which sometimes worked, connecting D Company with Battalion Headquarters. Guy, as he had seen done in the films, wrote on a piece of paper Ask Bn. H.Q. if these chaps are genuine and turned to Brent: ‘Just attend to this will you, Bill? I’ll see to our visitors,’ and to the Loamshires: ‘Come outside. It’s rather a good billet, isn’t it?’
They stepped out to the hotel terrace; bright blue overhead and before them; warm gravel underfoot; roses all round them; at his side, the enemy. Guy studied the two men. They were in service uniforms. They should have been in battle-dress. The junior had not yet spoken - a German accent perhaps; the senior was altogether too good to be true, clipped voice, clipped moustache, a Military Cross.
‘You want to see my L.M.G. positions, I expect?’
‘Well, I suppose we ought to some time. At the moment I’m more interested in accommodation and messing arrangements. Is the bathing good? How do you get down to the beach? As far as I’m concerned this is going to be my summer holidays. We’d no sooner got straightened out after Dunkirk than they put us on defence duty on the invasion coast.’
‘Would you like a bathe now?’
‘Sound scheme, eh, Jim?’
The junior officer gave a grunt which might have been Teutonic.
‘We usually undress up here and go down in great-coats. I can fit you out.’
Brent joined them to say that he had not been able to get an answer from Headquarters.
‘Never mind,’ said Guy, ’I’ll see to it. I want you now to take our visitors bathing. Show them up to my room. They’ll leave their things there. Find them a couple of great-coats and towels.’
As soon as the Loamshires had gone Guy turned back and found Sergeant-Major Rawkes.
‘Sergeant Major,’ he said.
‘Did you see anything odd about those two officers who came in just now?’
‘We have never had much of an opinion of the Loamshires, sir.’
‘I suspect them. They’ve just gone down to bathe with Mr Brent. I want you to relieve the man at the gun covering the bathing place.’
‘Me, sir? At the gun?’
‘Yes. This is a security matter. I can’t trust anyone else. I want you to keep them covered all the time, on the way down, in the water, on the way up. If they try anything funny, fire.’
Sergeant Major Rawkes, who had in recent weeks formed a good opinion of Guy, looked at him with mild despair.
‘Shoot Mr Brent, sir?’
‘No, no. Those fellows who say they are in the Loamshires.’
‘What exactly would you mean by funny, sir?’
‘If they attack Mr Brent, try to drown him, or push him over the cliffs.’
Rawkes shook his head sadly. He had let himself be taken in. He should never have come near trusting a temporary officer.
‘That’s orders, sir?’
‘Yes, of course. Get on with it quick.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He walked slowly to the gun pit.
‘’Op it, you two,’ he said to the men on duty. ‘Don’t ask me why. Just ’op it and be grateful.’
Then he lowered himself to the Bren, stiffly, in protest. But as he put the weapon to his shoulder, he relaxed a little. This was a rare sport, officer-shooting.
Guy ran to his room and examined the intruders’ kit. One of them instead of a service revolver was carrying a Luger. Guy pocketed the cartridge-clips of both weapons. There was no other suspicious feature; everything else in their pockets was English including a very correct move-order. Guy tried to telephone again and got through to Sarum-Smith.
‘I must speak to the C.O.’
‘He’s at a conference at Brigade.’
‘Well, the second-in-command or the adjutant then.’
‘They’re out. There’s only me and the quartermaster left.’
‘Can you get a message through to the C.O. at Brigade?’
‘I don’t think so. Is it important?’
‘Yes. Take it down.’
‘Wait a jiffy till I get a pencil.’
There was a pause and then the voice of Apthorpe spoke. ‘Hullo, old man, something up?’
‘Yes, will you get off the line. I’m trying to pass a message to Sarum-Smith.’
‘He’s gone off to find a razor blade to sharpen his pencil.’
‘Well, will you take it? Message begins: “D Coy to 2 Bn via Bde HQ.”’
‘I’m not sure that’s the correct form.’
‘Damn the correct form. Tell the C.O. that I’ve got two men here who claim to be Loamshires. They say they have orders to take over my positions. I want to know if they’re genuine.’
‘I say, old man, that sounds a bit hot. I’ll come right over myself.’
‘Don’t do anything of the sort. Just get my message to the C.O.’
‘I could be with you in twenty minutes on my motor-bike.’
‘Just pass my message to the C.O., there’s a good chap.’
Huffily: ‘Well, if you don’t want me, that’s your look-out. But it seems to me far too serious a matter to settle single-handed.’
‘I’m not single-handed. I’ve a hundred men here. Just pass the message.’
Very huffily: ‘Here is Sarum-Smith. It’s his pigeon to pass messages. I’m very busy here, I can tell you, on pretty confidential business.’
Sarum-Smith, back at the telephone, took the message.
‘Sure you’ve got it clear?’
‘Yes. But I think there’s an order that has some bearing on your query. It came just as the adjutant was leaving. He told me to pass it on but I’ve not got round to it. Wait a sec. It’s somewhere here. Yes. Second Battalion will hand over their positions to Fifth Loamshires and concentrate forthwith at Brook Park with full stores and equipment. That’s the place we first arrived at. Sorry for the delay.’
‘Damn.’
‘Do you want that message sent to the C.O.?’
‘No.’
‘It’s all been rather a flap about nothing, hasn’t it?’
As Guy rang off he saw the bathers return up the cliff under the sights of the entrenched Bren gun. They had enjoyed their swim, they said. They lunched with Guy, slept, and bathed again, then drove back to their unit. It would surprise them, Guy supposed, when they found their pistols unloaded. They would never know they had been as near death that sunny first day of their holidays as on the dunes at Dunkirk. One untimely piece of horse-play and they might have been goners.

(Loamshire has a distinguished pedigree in English Literature, one which an idle pedant might one day wish to investigate. Google comes up with over a thousand entries when you put the word into its search bar [early 2005]. To me it always seems to have a ring of insincerity, since the county, of course, does not exist and the name is ridiculous.)

185 Brook Park
I have not established that this place existed. EW does not mention the name in his diary for his period. It is obviously in Cornwall, as EW confirms on page 450.

185 ‘Dispersal’
i.e. deliberately scattering the troops over a landscape for the purpose of increasing survivability. It made them more difficult to detect and gave a more diffuse target for the enemy when they were detected. One problem with dispersal was that it was difficult to organise and co-ordinate the equipment and supplies of the forces both for the dispersal and for the subsequent re-integration. Another was that a concentrated enemy force could easily plough right through your forces and win the battle in short order, as the Germans actually did in northern France in 1940.

185 Somaliland
see my note (page 57). The British withdrew from British Somaliland in the summer of 1940 because the Italians made it clear they were about to annex it to their East African empire and British forces were too few to defend it. In the following year British soldiers, in sufficient numbers, better prepared and well led, drove the Italians not only from Somalia but from Ethiopia and Eritrea too.

186 ‘the Languishing of Leonard’
It is difficult to know which literary incident de Souza is plundering in this phrase, but I think it is probably something like the trapping in unprofitable misery of the Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s poem or the despair of some youthful lover in a Romantic ballad. Sheridan has a Lydia Languish in his play The Rivals, but her languishing consists of self-regarding idleness and boredom.

4

188 Xenophon
This is a reference to a textbook based on the writings of the Greek historian and soldier Xenophon (431 BC–352? BC). The text is probably the Anabasis, an account of his leadership of a trek by 10,000 threatened Greek soldiers to safety at Trebizond on the Black Sea.

188 Dakar
then a French colonial city, now the capital of Senegal. When France fell it was expected that the French colonies would line up behind General de Gaulle and his Free French forces based in London. Many colonies continued however to support the government in the homeland, which was the collaborationist regime now centred on the provincial spa town of Vichy. France had been divided into two : in the north and west a German-occupied area under military law with Paris still as its capital; in the rest of France a client government headed by the aged Marshal Pétain.
The progress of this naval and military expedition to Dakar in confident expectation of a hearty welcome is one of the more disgraceful incidents in a very good year for such events. The date is late August 1940.

188 They’re putting the Marines in before us, blast them.
This remark has extra piquancy when one remembers that EW himself was in the Marines on this expedition.

188 froggy business
i.e. French business. This slang expression for French was, and is, common. It derives from the presence in French cuisine, disgusting to English notions, of the delicacy frogs’ legs.

189 He had been looking like a ghost for some time.
At this point EW cut out a further passage from MA about Captain Truslove. Guy was not to be allowed in SH to daydream about fantasy figures from his childhood. It reads :

Something of this kind had happened in Captain Truslove’s regiment. A showy polo-player named Congreve sent in his papers when they were under orders for foreign service. The colonel announced at mess: ‘Gentlemen, I must request that Captain Congreve’s name shall never again be mentioned in my presence.’ Congreve’s fiancée returned his ring. From colonel to drummer-boy all felt tainted and many of their subsequent acts of heroism were prompted by the wish to restore the regiment’s honour. (Not until the penultimate chapter did Congreve turn up again, elaborately disguised as an Afghan merchant with the keys of the Pathan fortress where Truslove himself awaited execution by torture.)

The incident is reminiscent of the main story-line from A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers.

189 the lightless concentration-camp which all Europe had suddenly become
This phrase makes us aware of the immense conquests achieved by the Germans, breath-taking in their suddenness. Since war had been declared a year before, Germany had conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France; and Italy and Soviet Russia were allies. Spain and Hungary were friendly, Sweden and Switzerland nervously neutral and the Balkan countries edgy in anticipation of the next blow.

189 Goanese stewards
Stewards from India and the Middle East were both cheap to hire and friendly and willing in their attitude. They had a job which was considered in their homelands the best they could have. Goa was a Portuguese-ruled enclave on the west coast of India which in a western sense had a tolerably civilised outlook; many of its inhabitants were and are Catholic. Goa was incorporated into India in 1961 and became a separate state within India in 1987.

190 a servant unexpectedly over-tipped
EW excised two short paragraphs here from MA, both to avoid another reference to the fantasy figure Captain Congreve and to soften the antagonism between Guy and Halberdier Glass, which seems an unprofitable development in the novel. They read :

To Glass Guy said: ‘If I hear of you laying hands on the ship’s company again, I’ll send you to the guard room.’
‘Sir,’ said Glass, looking at Guy as though at Captain Congreve who let down the regiment.

191 FRANÇAIS DE DAKAR! Joignez-vous à nous pour délivrer la France! GENERAL DE GAULLE
‘FRENCHMEN OF DAKAR! Join us and save France! GENERAL DE GAULLE’

191 the battleship Barham, to a little vessel named Belgravia
The battleship was to be destroyed by enemy torpedoes in a remarkably short time on 25th November 1941. The Belgravia really did exist and did contain delicacies intended for the surrendering French garrison and their celebrating brothers-in-arms on the expected successful completion of the expedition.

191 ‘Mae West’ life-belts
i.e. an inflatable life-jacket, so-called because its shape reminded airmen of the buxom figure of the actress Mae West (1892-1980).

191 the cruiser Fiji was torpedoed
This happened on 1st September 1940. The cruiser nevertheless managed to make her way safely back to port.

192 a unit of unknown character called a ‘commando’
The term was unfamiliar in 1940, but it soon caught the British imagination. The word, which is of Portuguese origin, was first used of Boer raiding parties in the Boer War, and was used by the British in World War II to mean a group of troops specially trained to raid enemy coasts covertly and effectively. Guy is to join a Commando later.
The Army Commandos had been formed only in June 1940. At this stage there were twelve commandos, each intended to have 500 men, though this was later reduced to 390. They were very unpopular with the regular regiments as they took many of their most able soldiers and at first seemed to specialise in ill-discipline and inactivity. EW himself was to serve with No. 8 Commando from November 1940.

192 a weapon like a hedging implement
It turns out to be a machete.

192 Presently the heat grew oppressive ... called the officers together.
This paragraph is EW’s description of the near-farcical end of the Dakar expedition. The French garrison, reinforced unexpectedly by Vichy French warships incompetently allowed to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, put up considerable opposition to General de Gaulle’s call for solidarity, and the Franco-British authorities on the spot thought that it would be too dangerous and costly to attempt a full-scale invasion, despite the quality of the force they had available to them. This ignominious retreat marked another stage in the growth of EW’s disaffection with the army.

193 the War Cabinet
a small group of politicians and senior officers, headed by the Prime Minister. They directed the strategy of the war

5

195 ‘Any more for the Skylark?’
a catchphrase based on the saying of owners of pleasure boats as they drummed up trade for their trips round the bay. Such boats were sometimes called Skylark.

197 ‘Halte-là! Qui vive?’
‘Halt! Who goes there?’ (French)

197 ‘act’ of contrition
Every Catholic child used to learn a prayer of contrition. It would be useful both in Guy’s position and in the confessional. Perhaps the shortest and most common one was :

O my God, because You are so good, I am very sorry that I have sinned against You and with the help of Your grace I will not sin again. Amen.

6

201 a Lee-Enfield
the Small Magazine Lee-Enfield, a British multiple-round bolt-action rifle from a company that already had a long history when it first introduced the rifle in 1907. In several forms, the Lee-Enfield remained the British Army’s main rifle until well after World War II.

202 berthed at a British port
i.e. Freetown in Sierra Leone

202 the doctrine of ‘dispersal’
See my note to page 185.

202 No one wished to go there.
EW omits here a reference in MA to the novel The Heart of the Matter by his friend and fellow-novelist Graham Greene. That novel was set in Freetown at around this time and EW could not resist mentioning it when he wrote MA. He found the section to be redundant when he collated SH. It reads :

Later when he came to read The Heart of the Matter Guy reflected, fascinated, that at this very time ‘Scobie’ was close at hand, demolishing partitions in native houses, still conscientiously interfering with neutral shipping. If they had not the services of the new Catholic chaplain, Guy might have gone to Father Rank to confess increasing sloth, one dismal occasion of drunkenness, and the lingering resentment he felt at the injustice he had suffered in the exploit to which he had given the private name of ‘Operation Truslove’.

Scobie is the ‘hero’ of The Heart of the Matter and Father Rank is the priest who advises him. EW had to leave out the reference to Operation Truslove anyway, since he was omitting all such references. (See my explanation of this.)

202 air raids
The Blitz proper began on 7th September 1940. German bombing raids on London and other British cities occurred every night until the middle of 1941.

202 the invasion had sailed and been defeated
After the war you met many people who still believed this unfounded rumour. I heard it myself from several different people, all of them sincere and certain of their information. The only common point to all of their accounts was that German bodies were washed up on the English Channel shore for months afterwards.

204 ‘dine’ him ‘out’
i.e the men wanted to give him a good send-off by putting on a feast for him. The wish shows how much they supported him in his present predicament.

204 ‘dash’
i.e. reward. The word is used in West Africa to signify a whole range of emoluments, not necessarily monetary, ranging from a gift to a bribe. It is said to derive from the Portuguese verb dar, meaning to give.

204 Mende ... Swahili
Mende is one of the local languages of Sierra Leone, Swahili the common language of Africans in East Africa many thousands of miles away. No native of Sierra Leone would understand Swahili.

204 sub judice
under consideration by a court of law (here an army court martial) and therefore excluded from discussion

205 laterite
the characteristic reddish-brown soil of tropical lands. It is formed when basalt is weathered in hot, humid conditions.

205 Syrian stores
The Syrians were famous in this period for their adventurous merchandising, setting up stores all over the developing world of Africa and the Near East. They became so prominent that foreign shopkeepers of other nationalities were often called Syrians.

205 a few printed pages
EW forgot to excise or change this reference, or chose not to do so. He means Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (see my note to page 202 above).

206 Ian Hay
Apthorpe means novels by Ian Hay, the nom-de-plume of John Hay Beith (1876-1952), a writer popular at that time who used his military experience in World War I as a background to his stories.

207 Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame’s book is a famous masterpiece, intended for children but enjoyed equally by adults. Mr Toad’s character as a bumptious, conceited, self-centred, cunning manipulator is also well-known.

207 “gilt-edged”
i.e. very secure investments issued by the British government

210 R.A.M.C.
Royal Army Medical Corps, the medical men who service the army

7

212 dipsomaniac
a person who has an uncontrollable desire to drink alcohol

214 White Man’s Grave
a general term for the West African coast, which consists almost entirely of mangrove swamp or rain forest. Before modern drugs were developed to combat them, partially at least, many insect-borne diseases were extremely threatening for European visitors.

215 Sir John Moore at Corunna
Sir John Moore (1761-1809) was the British general in charge of the Peninsular War campaign against Napoleon Bonaparte before Wellington arrived in Spain. He was a brilliant trainer of infantrymen but hampered in Spain by lack of numbers and a defeatist attitude held by the Spanish themselves. In the winter of 1808-9, instead of retreating to Portugal as Wellington was later to do (and as he wanted to do), Moore was ordered forwards and had to make a run for the northern port of La Coruña, where ships were waiting to take off his army. The French attack on La Coruña on 16th January 1809 was beaten back but Moore himself was fatally wounded. He was quietly and quickly buried there. Though he was not honoured by his country, he had in fact prevented the French conquest of Spain that year.
In 1817 Charles Wolfe published a poem called The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. It was widely anthologised. It must be this poem that Sarum-Smith thinks he is remembering. In fact Apthorpe’s funeral could not be more unlike Sir John’s, a fact which shows that Sarum-Smith just has a generalised feeling about the poem and not a detailed knowledge of it. The first two stanzas prove the point :

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried,
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.

215 the Duke of Wellington’s at St Paul’s
This funeral was a great state occasion carried out with military precision, with a public aspect more in keeping (just!) with the standard which Sarum-Smith and de Souza witness in Freetown. It too was commemorated by a famous poem, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, but this one was by Lord Tennyson himself. The first three verses are :

I.
Bury the Great Duke
With an empire’s lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke
To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation.
Mourning when their leaders fall,
Warriors carry the warrior’s pall,
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.

II.
Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?
Here, in streaming London’s central roar.
Let the sound of those he wrought for,
And the feet of those he fought for,
Echo round his bones for evermore.

III.
Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,
As fits an universal woe,
Let the long, long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low.

215 ‘Funny I was thinking the same.’
In MA there are six further sentences :

‘Funny I was thinking the same. I rather preferred Crouchback on the whole.’
‘He seemed a nice enough fellow. I could never quite make him out. Pity he made such an ass of himself.’
Already the Second Battalion of the Halberdiers spoke of Guy in the past tense. He had momentarily been of them; now he was an alien; someone in their long and varied past, but forgotten.

A rather downbeat note on which to end a novel.