Name: Men at Arms
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780316926287

Evelyn Waugh

"An eminently readable comedy of modern war" (New York Times), Men at Arms is the first novel in Evelyn Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy. Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first novel in Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback ("the finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II" --Atlantic Monthly), which also comprises Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender.

Men at Arms

The first part of the Sword of Honour Trilogy, inspired by the author’s experiences in World War II. Guy Crouchback, the youngest member of a declining British aristocratic family, is on self-imposed exile in Italy, ashamed of his failed marriage. When World War II breaks out, he sees a chance to turn his life around, and to combat the evils of modernity. As it turns out, war is not so glamorous as he’d imagined, and he finds himself an officer in an old, stodgy regiment, surrounded by eccentric and buffoonish characters, like his friend Apthorpe, a career soldier with an exceedingly complicated past. Guy is determined to do right by himself, and by his Catholic faith, but circumstances will not make it easy. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

Edwin Lang

A recent review of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy, the Sword of Honour, includes a quote (<a href="https://evelynwaughsociety.org/2017/joan-didion-reviews-sword-of-honour/" rel="nofollow noopener"> (Joan Didion Reviews Sword of Honour, 1962) </a> in which she assesses Waugh as being a good writer who in this series had crafted a tale that she considers a ‘true story’: <blockquote>For although (this is) a fictional account of Guy Crouchback, a middle-aged English aristocrat fighting in World War II (she) calls this a true story, because it follows a man who “attempts to make a social cause a moral cause in a society bereft of moral meaning.”</blockquote> Men at Arms is the first of the three books wherein we meet Guy Crouchback who, after finding it near impossible to get into any armed force - as he is deemed too old at about 35 years of age, finally finds someone to take him on and he enlists with the Halberdiers. In Officers and Gentlemen, the second book, Guy is sent to Crete and arrives at the very moment the Allies are being evacuated, almost as haphazardly and disastrously as at Dunkirk a couple of years before. He gets a taste of defeat at the hands of the German forces and is devastated. In Unconditional Surrender things wrap up well and nicely, although by this time Home Office considers Guy a spy. This is a tale of a mid-life, down-on-his-luck member the British aristocracy who enters World War II: one of the characters, Ludovic, explains to a protégé that there are three reasons a man signs up (1) to ‘cut a gallant figure’ – we recognize Trimmer here, but so is Ludovic in the eyes of his protégé, (2) for romantic reason, such as serving one’s country in time of need and (3) to regain a lost sense of honour, and here we find Guy. For the past almost ten years he has been in self-exile, in Italy, in an old home owned by his once wealthy ancestors, trying and failing to recover from wounds of his failed marriage. He is a gentleman at heart, and a farmer at that, and years before this story begins had had the misfortune of falling in love with and marrying a bon-vivant, a woman of the 1920’s whose appreciation of men and the good life, her sexual appetite and overall zest for life far outpaced his and his moral sense of right and wrong. A farmer’s wife she was not. And even though she left him and remarried, again and again, (or simply had flings), he being a Catholic in the now late 1930’s still believed himself married. He was in every sense therefore a devastated man, and this is how we first meet Guy Crouchback in the first of Evelyn Waugh’s books, Men at Arms. He was someone searching for meaning and for something to bring a sense of honour. This is slightly tangential to the review except to emphasize how tough it is for us to imagine what it had been like. It is also neat I think what we owe to people who precede us, who come into our lives even briefly. I had known nothing about Waugh but discovered in reading his work that I liked him and his writing. I had never been exposed to his work, and probably would never have read him except that some years ago I had received a box of books previously owned by an old and now deceased Monseigneur who I had gotten to know a little when he was assigned to our Church. He was an old school but devout priest, and in the evenings, he sometimes show-up slightly inebriated, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and play baseball with me and my young children in the school park next to his Church. He had been a young man during the War, and like most people of his generation had a humane, authentic and disciplined quality about him. So I had his Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, and some weeks before the pandemic began to unfold I used Abe Books to track down and order the other two books comprising the trilogy. I am glad I did because Waugh’s work seems to reflect what we are enduring with the Coronavirus (COVID-19 disease) pandemic and will again as climate change impacts us more and more steadily. This World War presaged a time of fundamental change for England and for the British. Waugh takes us through this period in his large cast of characters among whom he threads the life of Guy Crouchback and those participating in the War effort or impacted by the German attack on London. It was a melancholic read and perhaps reflected what it had been like for the British at home and away at war but on the whole it was light and humorous throughout. There is a sense that Waugh considered that joining the War effort was synonymous with having a “Death Wish” - as opposed to some innate desire to win, it simply seemed to be the right thing to do for many men, for whom it was a moral duty and aligned with their innate desire for chivalry, or simply a desire for adventure or then again outrage that had infused the British, and later the Americans who joined after Pearl Harbor. Waugh also seemed to reassess the War from the perspective of men and women at all levels who weren’t terribly or intimately involved except on the peripheries – that perhaps the British, had they been left alone, would very deservingly have lost the effort against Germany. It is also a far cry, say from Tom Brokaw’s review of the American contribution in his ‘The Greatest Generation’, where for Americans WWII had seen the best fighting the best, a glorious time, pulsating with drama and heroics both on and off the field, and in the labs. There is a sense too that Winston Churchill (one of my heroes) – in spite of his outstanding oratory and parliamentarian skills – inadvertently continued the demise of England and that of British life: ‘change and decay, the victory of cleverness over integrity’ that the ascent of the Americans seemed to presage and enable, creating beneficiaries of what the Atlantic magazine (A Maverick Historian, February 2001) called the ‘…. the daily triumph of expedient behaviour’, such that even despicable and unprincipled people like Trimmer could achieve through shameless negotiation, maneuvering and sheer good luck what others through work and contribution could not. Waugh’s characterizations though are wonderful. Even in scoundrels like Trimmer, one could see him for what he was and yet like him nonetheless; or Veronica – I can’t imagine what people in her time (1930’s, early 1940’s) would have thought of her escapades – who was nonetheless a delight whenever she reentered the story; and even Ludovic, a lowly private who saves Guy’s life at great cost to himself, rises to Major and gradually becomes a successful writer to boot; and Guy himself, a reasonably good man, likeable and a practicing Catholic but for whom no one seemed to have had any great respect, who seems perhaps to have become the very essence of what England was on the verge of becoming, but still he always mattered to us. Quite late in the third book a Jewish refugee, stuck in limbo in Yugoslavia, challenges Guy in a conversation she is having with him in his futile attempt to get her and her husband to safety: ‘Is there any place that is free from evil … it seems to me that there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere’. And Guy realizes at that moment that it had been a wish that he had basked in too. As usual, good literature like this is not only enjoyable but helps us reflect on our own life and times. Edwin

Guy Crouchback begins his career as an officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Despite his high spirits and chivalry, he sees only the trimmings and none of the action. His idealism undaunted, Guy finds himself in West Africa and, in his first campaign, manages to blot his copybook.

Men at Arms

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