Books: War Revisited

MEN AT ARMS (314 pp.) — Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($3.50).

Good satirists get so hot under the choler that they are always in danger of breaking out in a sentimental sweat—which is why many of them cling tightly to cold ferocity and suppress the feeblest spasms of affection. Satirist Evelyn Waugh has been no exception, but he is one of the few of his kind who has found the conflict between satirical art and goodness of heart a nagging, challenging problem. His ideal is the simple, honest “Christian gentleman”; Waugh cherishes things romantic, patriotic and traditional. Moreover, he is a religious man, whose irrepressible satirical arrogance is at variance with his sense of Christian humility.

In some of his novels Waugh has got around his problem by succumbing wholly either to ferocity (as in The Loved One) or heartburn (as in A Handful of Dust). More often, he has kept his anger uppermost and merely hinted at a grumpy sympathy with mankind. But in Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946), he made his first major effort to express fully both sides of his divided self—to give poison only where poison was due, to cool boiling oil with holy water.

In his new novel, the first volume of a trilogy about World War II, Waugh broadens and deepens the scope of this experiment. Reading Men at Arms is like hearing a full keyboard used by a pianist who has hitherto confined himself to a single octave. Waugh is fully alive to the fact that no modern war is just a soldier’s war. The drawing rooms, kitchens and clubs of the home front interest him just as much as the barracks and the tents. Furthermore, his interest in the battles is tightly linked with his interest in the cause for which they were (or were not) fought. His war is simultaneously against Hitler and against “a public quite indifferent to those trains of locked vans . . . rolling East and West from Poland and the Baltic, that were to roll on year after year bearing their innocent loads to ghastly unknown destinations.”

The Regiment. Hero Guy Crouchback is a familiar Waugh character in that, dramatically speaking, he is not a hero at all. Like Waugh himself, Guy is a Roman Catholic romantic, but for the rest he is an older version of those earlier Waugh stooge-heroes whose very decency caused them to be trampled underfoot by hemen, clawed apart by harpies, robbed of their rights by double-dealers—and then trounced by Evelyn Waugh into the bargain. World War II finds Guy a dispossessed man in every sense, abandoned by a feckless wife, deprived of spiritual zest by isolation. Waugh is frank to admit that to a man like Guy, World War II was a matter for “jubilation.”

Guy joins a regiment named the Halberdiers, to be trained as an officer. To him, as to Waugh (who was himself a captain in the Royal Horse Guards), the Halberdiers are a dream come true. They embody all the sentiments of which Guy was starved in the prewar world. Tradition, esprit de corps, ritual and courtesy are combined with high efficiency and discipline. The Halberdiers still loyally toast their Colonel-in-Chief, the Grand Duchess Elena of Russia, who lives “in a bed-sitting-room at Nice.” They take “peculiar pride” in accepting whatever recruits are sent to them, confident that their “age-old methods of transformation” can make a good fighting man out of the poorest mouse. In Guy’s eyes they are both monks and soldiers—in short, Crusaders.

One of the most surprising feats in Men at Arms is the way Waugh, too, throws open the sacred doors of the Halberdier mess to all sorts and conditions of men, making the regiment a symbol of the church militant in which he believes. Apart from Guy, none of the newer officers is a devout man, and most of them are intellectual mediocrities at best. But to Waugh —and to the reader, after Waugh has waved his magic wand of characterization —mediocrity seems not only a human condition but a fascinating one. The only trouble with it is that it is incapable of leading a Crusade—a job which Waugh turns over to one of his most scintillating creations, Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook.

The Warrior. Ritchie-Hook is anything but a saint. Like many a Crusader, he fights simply because he loves “blood and gunpowder.” Hand-to-hand scrapping is his ideal: “Everything else [in war],” he assures Guy, “is just bumf and telephones.” His pursuit of his ideal has left him with “a single, terrible.eye . . . black as the patch which hung on the other side of the lean, skew nose.” His smile is a grim baring of carnivorous teeth; he grasps his cocktail glass in “a black claw” consisting of “two surviving fingers and half a thumb.” He is fond of discoursing on the proper use of infantry. “You must use them when they’re on their toes . . . Use them . . . spend them. It’s like slowly collecting a pile of chips and then plonking them all down . . . It’s the most fascinating thing in life.”

Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, brute symbol of ferocity and military leadership, stands at one extreme of Men at Arms. At the other is Captain Apthorpe, who stands for all that is most ridiculous, most pompous, most bumbling and yet most sympathetic in human nature. He has spent most of his life in Bechuanaland, and he joins the Halberdiers with a “vast accumulation of ant-proof boxes, waterproof bundles, strangely shaped, heavily initialed tin trunks and leather cases.” As an antiseptic precaution he has his “Thunder Box”—a portable chemical toilet built of oak and brass.

The Man Who Died. Boastful, untruthful, utterly incompetent, Apthorpe dies of fever in a West African hospital. But it is only when he is on his deathbed, “staring at the sun-blinds with his hands empty on the counterpane,” that the reader grasps the true nature of Waugh’s creation. Captain Apthorpe is Shakespeare’s Falstaff, perfectly brought up-to-date, but with his roots set firmly in the historic past. And it is Brigadier Ritchie-Hook who drives him to his death, much as King Henry V impatiently rid his army of “that stuff’d cloakbag of guts.”

It is this blending of history and modernity, of changing and changeless things, that gives Men at Arms its weight and vision. By the end of the volume the Halberdiers have not done much more than finish their training, but Waugh has already completed them as individual representatives of an ancient nation turning a new page of its history. Sometimes the load is too much for his stature and he reverts (particularly where the “Thunder Box” is concerned) to scatological burlesque. Sometimes his passion for bloodshed and his awe of warriors like Ritchie-Hook so dull his intelligence that he becomes absurd. But such collapses have always been a part of Waugh. Sometimes they have seemed to be a major part, but Men at Arms argues that they are not. If his trilogy continues as well as it has begun, it will be the best British novel of World War II.