Sewanee Review

There’s a special providence in the fall of a bomb.

—Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honor

As I was beginning to write this essay about Evelyn Waugh’s World War ii trilogy, The Sword of Honor (1965), the following quotation caught my eye: “Lussu is as conscious as Evelyn Waugh was of the grotesquerie of war, with its tendency to put in command those who are by nature inadequate, idiotic, or psychopathic.” Joseph Farrell is probably alluding to Sword of Honor in this review of a translation of a World War i memoir by Emilio Lussu, and the allusion raises a question: What is there, if anything, that distinguishes Sword of Honor in tone and direction from, say, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or from the vast majority of modern war narratives? Put another way, how can any modern writer with a firsthand knowledge of the carnage and absurdities of war depict such things without adopting a cynical worldview, as the cultural and literary historian Paul Fussell seems to have done? Arguing that irony is the dominant literary form of expression evoked by modern warfare, Fussell describes the effect of his first combat experience: “My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just. The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic.” Are we to take the epigraph above, Waugh’s modified echo of Hamlet’s words, as ironic, cynical, even caustic, or has the novelist somehow managed to create a work that depicts a just world, despite its chaotic underpinnings, a world that Fussell did not see?

The title page of Sword of Honor gives us its lineage in a nutshell: “A final [End Page 674] version of the novels Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961).” Waugh’s preface tells us that he has made changes to remove repetitions, discrepancies, and passages that now seem tedious to him. I discuss only the final version, except for one revision that seems thematically significant—more about this later. Waugh’s story, somewhat based on his own experiences in the British army during World War ii, follows Guy Crouchback, the only surviving son of an aristocratic family now in financial decline after an honored history of recusancy—from his enlistment at the war’s beginning until slightly after its end.

Ever since Gulliver travelled, readers have learned to pay special attention to the names of characters in satiric fiction. Waugh uses this convention throughout, especially with three major characters—Guy Crouchback, Virginia Troy, and Trimmer. To begin with, Guy. Historians and philologists have had a field day arguing about the possible meaning of crouchback when it was applied to Edmund Plantagenet (1245–1296), the second son of King Henry iii, but the fit for Waugh’s work has nothing to do with the perhaps slanderously derived meaning, “hunchback.” Both Edmund and Guy are younger sons, one possible link, and Edmund participated in the ninth crusade, thereby permitting him to wear the cross on his back. And this connection is what Waugh has in mind for Guy. Or, better, what Guy has in mind for himself as he seeks to redeem with military exploits a rather lackluster and failed life. Guy’s motives for going to war are doubly dubious. He seems almost to welcome the opportunity to die for his country, while his country seems set on denying him that opportunity, as Guy faces a series of obstacles first in enlisting and later in being posted to a theater of war. For once the establishment is acting rationally, as Guy’s age—he is thirty-five in 1939—and lack of military skill and experience make it most likely he will achieve his death wish, should he actually see combat. Less likely, he might somehow act heroically and compensate for his failure to carry on the ancient family line. Guy does eventually learn that his private honor cannot be satisfied by war—to echo the words a Jewish...