I am treating myself to 20th-century novels after my marathon of Greek tragedy last spring. I am still haunted by Medea’s strikingly feminist quote, “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” But it foreshadows the horror ahead.
And so I am relaxing with Evelyn Waugh’s World War II classic, the Sword of Honour trilogy. These semi-autographical novels, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, record military botches, successes, and battles. Waugh wouldn’t be Waugh without humor, but this is nothing like Waugh’s witty satires, Vile Bodies, Scoop, and The Loved One. Waugh has a wicked sense of humor, but this is a serious work.
This is the story of Guy Crouchback, a devout Catholic who returns from the family manse in Italy to England to enlist in the army and fight Hitler. He approaches all his friends and contacts. They say he is too old (he is in his mid-thirties). They tell him it’s not like the last war, when they needed “cannon fodder.” Guy is so unhappy and lonely that he is willing to be cannon fodder.
But he cheers up when his father introduces him to an officer in a Scottish brigade, the Halberdiers, where he can undergo officer training. There is a large, colorful cast of characters, some likable, others very peculiar, but on a third reading I am especially fond of his roommate Althorpe, a ridiculously meticulous, silly, paranoid man in his thirties who is obsessed with his chemical toilet, the Thunderbox. He recruits Guy. to help him hide it from their fellow officers, but one-eyed Colonel Ritchie-Hook, known for decapitating his victims of war, repeatedly steals it. Much space is devoted to the fate of the Thunderbox, that unlikely prize of war.
I’m on the third volume, and again it is such a treat.
I hope you, too, enjoy your summer reading!
