The Second World Waugh - some thoughts on 'Put Out More Flags' and 'The 'Sword of Honour' trilogy

I knew this would happen. No sooner had I finished re-reading ‘Brideshead Revisited’ than I had to turn again to ‘Put Out More Flags’, Evelyn Waugh’s very funny, very melancholy novel of the Phoney War.  And then of course I had to go on to the great Waugh trilogy, known collectively as ‘Sword of Honour’. They’re all connected, linked partly by the war and partly by Waugh’s melancholy version of Roman Catholicism.  I’m not in a position to know, but I believe more conventional RCs often find Waugh’s approach to the faith eccentric. Personally, I find it interesting and illuminating.

 

Waugh’s books have been divided into accounts of a wholly appalling, cruel world in which God is apparently absent, and others in which the hero finds that , in the end, there is nothing worthwhile but God, and His grace, in the world. I’m not sure it’s that simple , and I even doubt sometimes whether these books will endure for much longer. This is not because of a fault in Waugh, but because the books are about an ostensibly modern world, yet so different from anything they know as to be utterly remote. If they were set on another planet, or two centuries ago, I think the current generation of people in their twenties and thirties might more easily see the point of them. But they cannot conceive that England was ever really like this.

 

 

Although the characters and plot are not directly connected, I always think of ‘Put Out More Flags’ as an overture to ‘Sword of Honour’ . Cruel  snarls at Cyril Connolly and his pretentious magazine ‘Horizon’ are a feature of both, as are jibes at left-wing literary London in general, British military incompetence, Communist infiltration of the establishment and the boundless stupidity of the internal security organs. 

 

The trilogy, by the way,  begins with ‘Men at Arms’, is succeeded by ‘Officers and Gentlemen’ and ends with ‘Unconditional Surrender’.  These three are so autobiographical that it is sometimes hard to forget that they are also fiction. Guy Crouchback, the central figure in ‘Sword of Honour’, even celebrates his birthday just one day later than Waugh himself ( I noticed this because Waugh and I share the same birthday).

 

The title ‘Sword of Honour’ is sourly satirical, referring to the sword specially forged ( at the suggestion of King George VI) to commemorate the Red Army’s stand at Stalingrad. The sword, apparently a very fine and possibly final example of the ancient English sword smith’s craft,  was actually presented to Stalin at Teheran by Winston Churchill, a sad national humiliation given the way in which Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt ganged up on Churchill during that conference. I believe it was dropped on the floor during or after the handover ceremony.

 

Waugh, and his hero Guy Crouchback, regarded the unchosen British alliance with Stalin as deeply dishonourable, as of course it was. ‘Men at Arms’ begins with Guy,  last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service – but greatly moved by the Stalin-Hitler pact. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades.

 

This scene is mirrored quite exactly towards the end of the trilogy (I won’t say exactly where) when a refugee says to him that there had been a will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish. She adds : ‘Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war’. Guy replies ‘God forgive me. I was one of them’. I have written elsewhere that this should have been the end of the trilogy, which in my view rather peters out towards the end. I  am sure that he had this dispiriting, defeated moment (presumably drawn from real life) in his mind when he wrote the opening scenes.  The description of the eventual fate of this refugee is one of the most unsettling and dismal moments in the whole work.

 

By the time Waugh wrote it, the very beginning of the 1960s, the true cost of the war in moral and cultural terms had not yet begun to be paid. The English middle classes appeared to have won back much of what had been lost in the war years and the Attlee period. The country still looked and felt (I can just remember this) more or less as it must have done before 1939, and astonishingly different from the way it looks and feels now. Men born before 1914 still had vigour and force, and dominated politics and the professions. Had he written the book in 1970, it would I think have ended on a very different note.

 

Now, Waugh’s unsparing bitterness is one of the things that makes his writing so good. But it is very strong meat. I must confess that for many years I have been unwilling to re-read his novel ‘A Handful of Dust’ because, since I grew up,  I have found one particular scene in it so distressing in its fury and misery, and its depiction of the casual evil to which we are so easily brought. I won’t say which moment it is, because I don’t even like to recount it.  For the same reason I have never been to see the film of the book.  I know that ‘A Handful of Dust’  is counted a masterpiece, and some people think it is his best. It’s just too much for me. It wasn’t when I was still a callow delayed adolescent. It is now.

 

But the bitterness is kept a bit more under control in the war trilogy, because it is also often very funny indeed. The ridiculous Apthorpe, (not forgetting his friend ‘Chatty’ Corner) is a giant comic creation. The insanely, yet loveably bloodthirsty Brigadier Ritchie-Hook ( based on a real person) is another. But, oh, the melancholy, and the sense of a beaten, demoralised nation – the stupid row about boots which ends when the Brigadier rasps ‘If they’re good enough to run away in, I cannot see what else we need to worry about’ (or some such words) - for the news of the British Army’s hurried retreat to Dunkirk has just arrived, and at that point nobody was pretending that this was our Finest Hour.

 

Guy Crouchback and his fellow Halberdier officers are trained in a decayed seaside resort in a converted, abandoned and obviously pretty desperate prep school called ‘Kut al Imara House’ . How many readers realise the significance of this name? No school could possibly have been given it. Thanks to my old-fashioned education I have always known that it is the site of a terrible and miserable British defeat (after a long siege in vile conditions) at the hands of the Turks (in what would later become Iraq) in 1916.  Many of those captured died of neglect and disease in captivity. Jan Morris gives a gruelling description of it in the last book in her Empire trilogy, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’  

 

The grim name presages much that is to come – the absurd propaganda phoniness of the early commando raids, the aborted landings in Dakar, the  futile catastrophe in Crete, the shocking desertion of Ivor Clare, apparently an embodiment of British courage, the moral collapse of Major Hound, the wholly fascinating , sinister, cruel character of Corporal-Major Ludovic, who ends up as an author of romantic fiction , gibbering at his pet Pekingese dog. And then there is the extraordinary character of Sir Ralph Brompton, perhaps based on Anthony Blunt, a dapper recruiter of Communist sympathisers into key positions, whose power and influence grow unchallenged through the final stages of the book. I personally long for a key to identify such characters, many of whom are too interesting, and too obviously pointed, to be wholly fictional.

 

Only Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, whose end I shall not reveal, and Guy’s saintly father,  emerge from the book with their honour more or less whole. I sense that Guy’s father is what Waugh himself would have wished to be, but knew perfectly well he could not be.

 

This sadness and melancholy is why you should start with ‘Put Out More Flags’. For this is sadder still. The pathetic last weekend of Cedric Lyne, doomed to die in Winston Churchill’s disastrous Norway adventure, and his schoolboy son, always stays in my memory.  This is perhaps because its brief and childish pleasures remind me of ‘Out Sundays’ from my own stern prep school (gosh, these strange places are the key to understanding the British governing and military classes, yet so little is written about them and people never confess to which ones they attended in reference books), awkward periods of release into the world of comfort and fun, preceded and followed by a life of hard beds, runny porridge and childish barbarity.  The contrast was often too much to cope with.

 

The scenes in the Ministry of Information are merciless (its headquarters, the University of London monstrosity which inspired Orwell’s vision of the Ministry of Truth, is said to ‘insult the sky’) as are the descriptions of the wartime security apparatus, and of the Connolly children, the worst evacuees in England. The Connollys are also very funny, though in a way that a lot of modern readers won’t like. Basil Seal is a close portrait of a real person so appalling (he is in other books) that the publishers feared he would sue for libel when he saw himself described. Waugh apparently claimed that anyone portrayed as successful with women, however nasty he was in other ways,  would never sue. He didn’t.

 

It is to this kindly, chaotic, ill-prepared, frivolous England, more or less clueless about what it is fighting or why,  that Guy Crouchback returns from Italy, to find that he is not wanted at all. This war will not be about romance, chivalry or goodness.  Nor was it, though many of us are still reluctant to admit that.  

 

Is it a great work of art? I hope so. It grows on me each time I read it, and I find I can recall many passages almost word for word, which doesn’t in any way reduce the pleasure. These books are honest about an era which – for many of us – is still fogged by illusion, or gilded with romance.  They should survive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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