Source of book: I own this.
I previously read Brideshead Revisited eight years ago. While I enjoyed it - Waugh is an excellent and perceptive writer - I did think that the ending was unconvincing and emotionally unsatisfying. Probably Waugh was trying really hard to deny his own sexuality and thus came up with the idea of a woman and the Catholic faith redeeming the protagonist. Perhaps Waugh was still trying to convince himself of his religious beliefs.
Later, during the Covid lockdown - literally one of a couple of books I checked out before the libraries shut down for months - I read Waugh’s short stories. Because they were organized in chronological order, it was fascinating to see his progression (or regression?) from the gentle and generous humor of his earlier works to the increasingly dark and disturbingly reactionary tone of his later works.
I am inclined to think that whatever happened to Waugh in the 1950s and 60s, including his mental breakdown and botched medical treatments, made him retreat to reactionism and bitterness that the world hadn’t turned out the way it did. Lowlights include his belief that he was demon-possessed (it turned out to be symptoms of bromide poisoning instead), and his crusade against the vernacular mass.
I did want to go back and read some of his more humorous works, though. Since we owned it, I decided to read the first book of his World War II trilogy, Men at Arms.
The trilogy follows Guy Crouchback, an aristocrat fallen on hard times, who decides to enlist in the military however he can, even though he is 36, has zero relevant skills, and totally sucks at military stuff.
As with most of Waugh’s works, there is an autobiographical element. He indeed did serve in the war - and was terrible at it. Part of the problem, of course, was the British class system. It was assumed that the gentry would be officers, and the plebes would be the soldiers. Because, you know, people of noble birth are naturally good leaders or something.
Men at Arms is certainly a humorous book. At times, it is laugh-out-loud funny. But the humor is definitely ironic, satirical, and sometimes dark. On a scale of humorists, I would classify it as significantly darker than that of, say, P. G. Wodehouse, but not as dark as Joseph Heller. Somewhere in the middle, at least in this book.
The central humor of the book centers around a pair of middle-aged would-be officers. Guy Crouchback is desperate to find a combat role - his older brother was killed in World War I, and he longs for the honor -posthumous or not - of glory in battle. He also has a failed marriage - his estranged wife has taken up with another man. Or rather a series of men. He has no children, so the Crouchback name will likely die with him. At least he can bring glory on the way out, right?
Oh, and Guy sees both Communism and Nazism as an embodiment of “modernity” that can now be fought as a tangible enemy. Yeah, Waugh was a bit weird about that whole cultural change thing.
One might ask why Crouchback doesn’t just get a divorce, remarry, and have an heir. Well, as one of the English Catholic families, remarriage isn’t an option for the Crouchbacks. Not really, at least in Guy’s mind. (Shades here of Waugh’s own failed first marriage and his need for an annulment in order to remarry.)
Crouchback finally gets an opportunity to join the fight, as an officer in the fictional “Royal Corps of Halberdiers,” through a friend of his nouveau riche brother-in-law pulling some strings.
There, he meets another older guy, Apthorpe, who has experience in colonial administration. Apthorpe is also a bit crazy, very alcoholic, and yet fits the military mode better. The two “uncles” have some fun adventures along the way.
Also a bit on the nutty side, but in a different way, is the Brigadier, Ben Ritchie-Hook, whose ludicrous actions at the end of the book end in catastrophe for himself, and, to a degree, to Crouchback.
I won’t get into the plot much more than that, although I will mention a few incidents.
Such as the madcap episode of the “thunder-box.” For those unfamiliar, this is a portable chemical toilet. Apthorpe has one from the Edwardian Era - a beautiful wood and brass unit that he is super proud of. He smuggles it into camp, intending to avoid the communal toilets out of fear of catching “the clap.” Things go…wrong. I won’t say more than that.
Also worth mentioning is Guy’s attempt to seduce his estranged wife - after all, the Church sees them as still married, so she is literally the only woman he can lawfully fuck before he ships out. It goes…badly. It’s funny, but in a really horrifying way.
There are so many witty lines, of course. This is Waugh, so expect that. And also a bit of a sharp edge to the wit. Here are my favorites.
Guy found it easy to confess in Italian. He spoke the language well but without nuances. There was no risk of going deeper than the denunciation of his few infractions of law, of his habitual weaknesses. Into that wasteland where his soul languished he need not, could not enter. He had no words to describe it. There were no words in any language.
The run-up to World War II is also interesting. If you don’t read British literature, it is easy to miss so much of what happened in the 1930s - the US had its depression and New Deal and that is usually what we get taught. But a lot was happening across the pond. Here is a line that I found fascinating.
“There will be no war. No one wants it. Who would gain?”
Yeah, it was in so many ways a blood stupid waste, but there you have it. Wars happen not because most people want them, but because stupid and malevolent people with power want them.
The first line that truly made me laugh out loud was from this exchange between Guy and the various branches of the military that keep turning him down.
“We don’t want cannon-fodder this time” - from the Services - “we learned our lesson in 1914 when we threw away the pick of the nation. That’s what we’ve suffered from ever since.”
“But I’m not the pick of the nation,” said Guy. “I’m natural fodder. I’ve no dependents. I’ve no special skill in anything. What’s more, I’m getting old. I’m ready now for immediate consumption. You should take the 35’s now and give the young men time to get sons.”
There is also this bit about Guy’s father’s reactionism:
Mr. Crouchback acknowledged no monarch since James II. It was not an entirely sane conspectus but it engendered in his gentle breast two rare qualities, tolerance and humility.
At one point, Guy and Apthorpe get confused by Ritchie-Hook, who mistakenly believes it was Guy who has been in Africa (rather than in Italy.) Which leads to this horrific bit of bigotry - religious and racial. Ritchie-Hook spews something nasty about Catholic priests, before being informed that Guy is a Catholic. And then this.
“Of course it’s because you live in Africa. You get a very decent type of missionary out there. I’ve seen ‘em myself. They don’t stand any nonsense from the natives. None of that ‘me velly Clistian boy got soul all same as white boss’. If you lived in Italy like this other young officer of mine, you’d see them as they are at home. Or in Ireland; the priests there were quite openly on the side of the gunmen.”
Yeesh. And don’t think Waugh, reactionary as he was, endorsed this. Another soldier describes Ritchie-Hook thusly after the incident.
“Regular old fire-eater, isn’t he?” said Sarum-Smith. “Seems to have made up his mind to get us all killed.”
In a later passage, Richie-Hook’s sense of tactics are illuminated in a hilarious manner.
The Training Programme followed no text-book. Tactics as interpreted by Brigadier Ritchie-Hook consisted of the art of biffing. Defense was studied cursorily and only as the period of reorganization between two bloody assaults. The Withdrawal was never mentioned. The Attack and the Element of Surprise were all. Long raw misty days were passed in the surrounding country with maps and binoculars. Sometimes they stood on the beach and biffed imaginary defenders into the hills; sometimes they biffed imaginary invaders from the hills into the sea. They invested downland hamlets and savagely biffed imaginary hostile inhabitants. Sometimes they merely collided with imaginary rivals for the use of the main road and biffed them out of the way.
I’ll also mention this poignant exchange between Guy and his estranged wife.
“You never married again?”
“How could I?”
“Darling, don’t pretend your heart was broken for life.”
“Apart from my heart, Catholics can’t remarry, you know.”
“Oh that. You still keep to all that?”
“More than ever.”
“Poor Guy, you did get in a mess, didn’t you? Money gone, me gone, all in one go. I suppose in the old days they’d have said I ruined you.”
…
“There’s one thing I always did feel bad about. How did your father take it all? He was such a lamb.”
“He just says: ‘Poor Guy, picked a wrong’un.”
As the training continues, bad news from the front lines continues to pour in. Guy has mixed feelings about the whole thing. Particularly about whether the war can be won.
For Guy the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore, had succeeded in ignoring more often than not in his service in the Halberdiers; that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.
Another line about Guy’s personality is interesting.
Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes. Guy was not troubled by this illusion, but he believed he was rather liked by these particular thirty men.
Late in the book, when the unit is finally deployed to French Algeria - or more accurately, to the coast of French Algeria - good old Ritchie-Hook again displays his colors.
“A French town in West Africa. Probably all boulevards and brothels if I know the French colonies.”
I’ll end with one line, after the botched reconnaissance attempt. Guy, per instructions, takes a coconut back with him. The next morning, one of his underlings asks, “Would you want to be eating this nut now, sir, or later?”
For any Waugh book, one probably should have a proper cocktail to accompany it. For Brideshead Revisited, the obvious and only choice is the Brandy Alexander. For Men at Arms, I would say the correct choice would be a Pink Gin. I ended up finishing the book before I remembered to do so. I will have to remedy that and add a picture to this post later.
Anyway, it was a fun read. I own the other two books of the trilogy and intend to read them in the future.
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