Sword of Honour
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Author | Evelyn Waugh |
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Language | English |
Publisher | Chapman & Hall |
Published | 1952–1961 |
The Sword of Honour is a trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh which loosely parallel Waugh's experiences during the Second World War. Published by Chapman & Hall from 1952 to 1961, the novels are: Men at Arms (1952); Officers and Gentlemen (1955); and Unconditional Surrender (1961), marketed as The End of the Battle in the United States and Canada.
Waugh received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Men at Arms in 1952.
The dust jackets for the books were designed by the popular illustrator Val Biro.
Plot summary
The protagonist is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic
He attempts to join the Army, finally succeeding with the (fictitious) Royal Corps of Halberdiers, an old but not too fashionable regiment. He trains as an officer and is posted to various centres around Britain. One of the themes is recurring "flaps" or chaos – embarking and disembarking from ships and railway carriages that go nowhere. Crouchback meets the fire-eating Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook (probably based on Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a college friend of Waugh's father-in-law whom Waugh knew somewhat from his club), and Apthorpe, a very eccentric fellow officer; in an episode of high farce, the latter two have a battle of wits and military discipline over an Edwardian thunder-box (portable toilet) which Crouchback observes, amused and detached. Before being sent on active service, he attempts to seduce his ex-wife Virginia, secure in the knowledge that the Catholic Church still regards her as his wife; she refuses him.
He and Ben Ritchie-Hook share an adventure during the Battle of Dakar in 1940. Apthorpe dies in Freetown, supposedly of a tropical disease; when it is discovered that Guy gave him a bottle of whisky when visiting him in hospital (there is an implication that Apthorpe's disease, unknown to Guy, was really alcoholic liver failure), Guy is sent home, having blotted his copybook. Thus ends the first book.
Crouchback eventually manages to find a place in a fledgling
Crouchback spends 1941–1943 in Britain, mostly at desk jobs. He turns 40 and, with Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union and Britain's subsequent alliance with the Soviets, feels a sense of the war's futility. American soldiers swarm around London. Virginia has fallen on hard times and is reduced to selling her furs. She had been persuaded to accompany Trimmer, her former hairdresser, who has been set up as a war hero for media consumption. She becomes pregnant by him and searches futilely for an abortion care provider. Eventually she decides to look for a husband instead. Crouchback is selected for parachute training, preparatory to being sent into action one last time. The commanding officer at the training centre is Ludovic. In Crete, Ludovic had deserted from his unit, and in the process murdered two men, one on the boat. Although Crouchback was delirious at the time, Ludovic is afraid that he will be exposed if Guy meets him. Already a misfit as an officer, he becomes increasingly paranoid and isolated.
Guy is injured during the parachute training, and finds himself stuck in an RAF medical unit, cut off from anyone he knows. He eventually contacts Jumbo Trotter to extract him and returns to live with his elderly bachelor uncle Peregrine Crouchback. His father having died and left an appreciable estate, Guy is now able to support himself comfortably. This attracts the attention of Virginia, who begins to visit him.
Before Guy goes abroad, he and Virginia are reconciled and remarry (i.e., simply resuming their marriage, in the eyes of the Catholic Church). Virginia stays in London with Guy's Uncle Peregrine and has her baby there. Despite being incorrectly suspected of pro-Axis sympathies because of his time in pre-war Italy and of his Catholicism, Guy is posted to
On his late father's advice, Guy attempts individual acts of salvation, but these ultimately make matters worse for the recipients. The Yugoslavian Jews receive gifts from Jewish organisations in the US, infuriating non-Jewish locals, although the gifts consist largely of warm clothing and food. Upon returning to England, Guy is told that some of his friends in Yugoslavia were shot as spies, largely because they had become so friendly with him.
After the end of the war Guy meets the daughter of another old Roman Catholic family, Domenica Plessington, and marries her. In Waugh's first version of the novel's conclusion, Guy and his second wife produce further children who are to be disinherited by Trimmer's son. Waugh altered this ending to an uncompromisingly childless marriage in the revised text, after realising that some readers interpreted such a conclusion as hopeful. "No nippers for Guy," he clarified in a letter to Nancy Mitford. Even so, although Waugh died in 1966, in the Penguin 1974 reprint Guy still has two sons with Domenica Plessington.
Themes
The novels have obvious echoes in Evelyn Waugh's wartime career; his participation in the
The novel is the most thorough treatment of the theme of Waugh's writing, first fully displayed in Brideshead Revisited: a celebration of the virtues of tradition, of family and feudal loyalty, of paternalist hierarchy, of the continuity of institutions and of the heroic ideal and the calamitous disappearance of these which has led to the emptiness and futility of the modern world.
Appreciation
It paints an ironic picture of regimental life in the British Army and is a satire on the wasteful and perverse bureaucracy of modern warfare. The point of view of Guy, whose Roman Catholicism and Italian experience combine with his diffident personality to make him something of an outside observer in English society, enables Waugh to push the satire hard and remain in voice.[according to whom?]
Underneath the comedy, the theme emerges ever more strongly. Guy Crouchback is a
This is made explicit in the episode after which the trilogy is named, at the beginning of the third and final book. A splendid ceremonial sword, the "
It is a resigned rather than an idealistic Guy who goes to Yugoslavia, and it is made clear that the future belongs not to idealism but to the cynical Trimmer or the empty American Padfield. The reader is never quite sure whether it is that Guy is powerless to resist the world's decline from a Golden Age of chivalry or whether the Golden Age was a romantic illusion.
Dramatisations
There have been five dramatisations of Sword of Honour for television and radio:
- 1967 Dorchester Hotel early in 1966 before the latter started work on the script. They had both attended Lancing College, a fact which came to light at the meeting, but despite an age difference of some fifteen years, neither lived to see the work broadcast the following year. The series was once available as a digital download, but the website has since been shut down, leaving it unavailable for public viewing.
- 1970 Radio 4 series narrated by Huw Burden.
- 1974 radio version written by Barry Campbell with Hugh Dickson, Norman Rodway, Carleton Hobbs and Patrick Troughton[1]
- 2001 TV film starring Daniel Craig
- 2013 radio version written by Jeremy Front, with Paul Ready as Guy Crouchback, and Tim Pigott-Smith as Ritchie-Hook.
References
- ^ Linden, Greg. "Radio Drama - Evelyn Waugh". Diversity Website. Retrieved 24 November 2018.