Officers And Gentlemen – Evelyn Waugh, 1955 ★★★

Resigning One's Manhood

The middle volume of any trilogy is heavy lifting. Either the author makes a case for triple the usual reader investment, or weaknesses in plot and character manifest themselves as unclearable hurdles.

Evelyn Waugh’s Officers And Gentlemen makes it over this challenge, just. It builds up the conflicts developed in his prior “Sword Of Honour” installment Men At War, introduces new characters to replace ones lost, and plunges protagonist Guy Crouchback into real combat.

If Men At Arms felt at times like a service comedy by way of Noel Coward, this time we face existential challenges of life and purpose:

There should be a drug for soldiers, Guy thought, to put them to sleep until they were needed. They should repose among the briar like the knights of the Sleeping Beauty; they should be laid away in their boxes in the nursery cupboard. This unvarying cycle of excitement and disappointment rubbed them bare of paint and exposed the lead beneath.

Is it as good? Here’s where I struggle. With most successful trilogies, the middle book almost can’t help but be the best. The story gets deeper, the characters more involving, the tensions tighter as resolution beckons but doesn’t quite arrive.

With Officers And Gentlemen, what you get isn’t as much a slide into a rabbit hole as a reshuffling of the deck. Two central characters of Men At War, Apthorpe and Ritchie-Hook, are dispensed with entirely; others like Guy’s father Gervase and brother-in-law Arthur Box-Bender are pushed to the margins. Meanwhile, the tone of our story becomes conversely more fantastic and more real.

The centerpiece is a British military operation on Crete that quickly deteriorates into a rout. Waugh draws here upon his own experiences and it shows, with an account that feels very first-hand. Yet it also seems tacked onto the thematic center of “Sword Of Honour,” pushing us from social farce into horrific tragedy.

The novel begins outside a private club in London, where Guy and another club member, Ian Kilbannock, watch a Nazi bombing overhead. They fall into arguing which British painter would depict the scene best. “Pure Turner,” Guy insists. “Not Martin. The sky-line is too low. The scale is less than Babylonian.”

Kilbannock is more reserved in his enthusiasm for apocalyptic carnage:

“Ah, you’re new to it. The bore is that it goes on night after night. It can be pretty dangerous too with these fire-engines and ambulances driving all over the place.”

The title of this novel might seem as innocuous as Men At Arms, but here, as there, there is a suggestion of duality. Just as Men At Arms suggests military life as a vaguely unnatural condition, Officers And Gentlemen carries a sense of contradiction. Not all officers are gentlemen; not all gentlemen are cut out for service.

For example, during the air raid, the one fellow at Guy and Ian’s club caught hiding under a billiards table is an Air Marshal who sheepishly claims to be observing protocol. One of Officers And Gentlemen’s main characters, Major Hound, is quite rigid on a parade ground yet falls to pieces when the action gets hot: “No sound penetrated to his kennel and in the silence two deep needs gnawed at him – food and orders. He must have both or perish.”

Opposite Hound is Ivor Claire, a thorough gentleman but as useless in his high-heeled way once battle is joined. We get early hints of Ivor’s true worth, such as an excessive attachment to a pet Pekinese. Guy himself is suckered by Ivor’s insouciant front:

Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

Guy doesn’t remain so blinkered. Unlike Hound, though, Ivor has the protection of fellow upper-class Brits to count upon.

What causes Guy to see Ivor as a fraud? It’s a central issue of the novel, and one which may not survive the translation into a different era. Claire winds up a deserter, albeit in a different direction. At the end of the Crete campaign, when his commando force is ordered to surrender, Claire decides a prison camp is not for him and leaves his troops for transport back to Alexandria and safety.

Claire explains it to Guy this way:

“And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It’ll be laid down in King’s Regulations as their duty – to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners.”

“Perhaps men wouldn’t take kindly to being trained by deserters.”

“Don’t you think in a really modern army they’d respect them the more for being fly?”

Waugh enthusiasts admire Officers And Gentlemen in large part for its depiction of the Crete campaign, a series of ignominious episodes of an army in wholesale retreat, as depicted through the fractured perceptions of Guy and Hound. Guy, like Waugh in the real battle, does his part with cool aplomb, if not much comprehension. Hound stumbles around, exposed as a coward and a liability to those around him.

Hampered by both abysmal planning and surprise, the British and their Commonwealth allies suffered one of their most devastating defeats at Crete in  May-June 1941. Waugh himself escaped on the last boat to Alexandria, like Guy in the novel. Image from http://www.travelcrete.gr/en/tour/battle-of-crete-the-island-of-the-brave.

There is a sense of rawness, of utter chaos, in the Crete section like nothing else I have encountered in Waugh’s writing, excepting a short story he wrote very early in his career, “The Balance,” a failed experiment in multiple perspectives. Similarly unmoored, the Crete account makes for a powerful reading experience, gripping and subjective, yet one never knows where one is until it is over.

Overall Officers And Gentlemen is a tad disappointing after the amusing coherence of Men At Arms. It feels recycled in places. In Men At Arms Guy and his comrades train at a British boarding school; in Officers And Gentlemen they camp at an inhospitable Scottish island where the daughter of the local laird, an unhinged Scottish nationalist, amuses them with her open support of the Nazis.

This, as well as other bits of business, such as a training officer who eats limpets off the seashore, seem set-ups for comedy that never quite arrives. The same applies to a sidestory involving a character from Men At Arms, one Trimmer, whom we see set up by the War Office as an example of the British fighting man in action, culminating in a misdirected commando raid in occupied France. Comic interruptus is a common condition for this novel, a sense of a serious writer struggling to contain his own impulse for delivering more whimsical material.

If there is a single underlying message in the comedic and dramatic halves of Officers And Gentlemen, it is that Great Britain was locked in a serious war it only partially understood. “It’s going to be a long war,” Guy is told by his friend and commanding officer, Tommy Blackhouse. “The great thing is to spend it among friends.”

But the term “friends” has loaded meaning here. Tommy and Guy became acquainted in a divorce proceeding in which Guy was the innocent husband and Tommy the other man. Tommy’s command presence in Guy’s new unit, X Commando, is hardly a success, with Tommy injured and his commandos nearly all captured.

The novel is dedicated to Robert Laycock, the actual commander of Waugh’s unit at Crete: “He will recognize this story as pure fiction: that is to say of experience totally transformed.” But is it really? Laycock and Waugh made it off Crete; most in their unit, like “Hookforce” in this book, were captured or killed.

David Cliffe, in his defunct but invaluable website on Waugh, notes a passage in Officers And Gentlemen removed from a later revision Waugh published shortly before his death, of Guy’s last day on Crete:

He had no clear apprehension that this was a fatal morning, that he was that day to resign an immeasurable part of his manhood.

As Cliffe notes, this sentiment seems to apply more to Laycock, or his brigade major Waugh, than to Guy, who is only swept along by the retreat and not directing it. As powerful a book as Officers And Gentlemen becomes in its last half, it is less sturdy in its construction than the best of Waugh in the awkward way it exposes a private despair.

Another despair gnaws at Officers And Gentlemen, and will be a defining theme of the last book in the trilogy, Unconditional Surrender. It centers on Bolshevism, a steady undermining of British society by left-wing elements who are secretly, doggedly aligned to the Soviet Union and its leader, Stalin.

In Officers And Gentlemen, we see one Bolshevik alone as able to withstand the prods of Hitler, and remain focused on final victory. Corporal-Major Ludovic “looks like a dishonest valet” but proves capable if ruthless in the clutch. Aligning with him has a downside, though, as Unconditional Surrender will demonstrate.

A darker Waugh makes for less pleasant reading, if still compelling. Officers And Gentlemen develops some worthy themes while abandoning others, leaving it to the next volume to make its case.