Men at Arms, by Evelyn Waugh: A Response

Book 5: 2024

Evelyn Waugh wrote better than any dead or living Briton from the 20th century. He tells stories that incorporate but transcend his perspectives. He understands how other people view the world and treats them all with the same level of respect: that is to say, he treats them all as farcical (far’s’cl for you sailors) excuses of a broken race that somehow carry a well-hidden grace visible only to those who wish to see it.

Also, his sentences are so continually (not continuously, I hasten to add) perfect that when I find one that disappoints, I know it must be an error, even a typo, and I rejoice with a joy so full of vainglory that I rush to my nearest-at-hand pencil with the enthusiasm of a man who has found the ash on which was built a royal palace.

Men At Arms launches Waugh’s three volume Sword of Honour trilogy, and I read it last year. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback, an English recusant¹ who spends the 1930’s in Italy after his wife divorces him, ending any hope that he might preserve his ancient line. His life drifts along the Italian coast like a sedate and sedated yacht. As Hitler and Mussolini rise to power, he is otherwise occupied. He knows Hitler is bad and he regards Mussolini as a chancer. But he is sedate and sedated, like a yacht floating in the harbor below his family’s ancient villa.

And then Guy Crouchback is aroused. The sedatives wear off; the yacht bumps a rock.

[Crouchback] had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart. Eight years of shame and loneliness were ended. For eight years Guy, already set apart from his fellows by his own deep wound, that unstaunched, internal draining away of life and love, had been deprived of the loyalties which should have sustained him. He lived too close to Fascism in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth; as a rough improvisation merely. He disliked the men who were edging themselves into power around him, but English denunciations sounded fatuous and dishonest and for the past three years he had given up his English newspapers. The German Nazis he knew to be mad and bad. Their participation had dishonored the cause of Spain, but the troubles of Bohemia, the year before, left him quite indifferent. When Prague fell, he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle. 

So he joins up, an old man of 36, called uncle by his fellow soldiers, but with clarity of purpose and nobility of sentiment. And, like any proper knight, with a clear enemy: “the Modern Age in arms.”

But this is Waugh. None of the promise of the foregoing, none of the attitudes embodied, none of the surrounding circumstances, no portion of the deep peace that had been brought to his heart survive the first year of the war. Waugh’s novel is endlessly, hilariously, melancholy.

Sword of Honour plays with the Renaissance romance; in particular, Ariosto’s 16th century epic poem, Orlando Furioso. Crouchback goes off to war for honour’s sake and pursues his adventures eagerly.

Only, he doesn’t, or at least it doesn’t last.

Guy is no Furioso. He is a Crouchback. He lives in exile, licking his wounds, as it were. Perhaps the adverb “eagerly” could be applied to his first steps toward combat, but by the end of 1940, at the latest, “resignedly” more closely approximates his energy. This is his story, and most readers will find something in it that corresponds to their own wrestling with the “Modern Age.”

Do I recommend Men at Arms? Without hesitation.

Euphonic and Insightful Writing

First, Evelyn Waugh writes perfect sentences that give the well-tempered reader an unparalleled pleasure.

A sentence is a relationship between words, and a well-written sentence sings that relationship.

But a sentence is not merely a relationship between words. It is also the expression of a relationship between things named by the words that comprise the sentence. It is a relationship between words put in relation to a relationship between things. In math, it is sometimes called a proportion: A:B::C:D, in which A and B are words and C and D are things.

More concisely and less precisely, a sentence is a relationship between words and things.

We readers delight in the euphonic sound of a well-expressed thought. In fact, when a thought is particularly well-expressed, we are often conscious of the delight it brings as it soothes the snipers hiding in our minds. We might feel envy, wishing we could have written such a sentence. We might feel pride, glorying in the fact that we could read and feel its elegance. Best of all, we might feel the simple, grateful satisfaction of a child receiving a Christmas gift. We anticipated it, to be sure, but to participate in beauty is a very different thing from expecting to participate.

But we don’t like being lied to. If the euphonic sound of the words sensually related strikes a discord with the realities named by the words, the euphonia encounters its limit—and we feel it. The sentence becomes phony or merely inept and we use words to write it off, like euphemism or dishonest or (if we are polite) bad or (if we are modern) - well, I can’t include any of the words moderns use to describe bad writing because their vocabularies are largely derived from misological media, which has undermined their capacity to express well what is badly done. Which takes me back to my point:

When a beautifully formed sentence hides a false relationship between real things, then the pleasure we derive from the sentence is restricted to its sensory presentation while our minds and souls feel nothing better than indifference. If we are healthy, our intellectual immune system prevents the nonsense from affecting our minds. The healthier, the more well-tempered our souls, the more clangs the discord.

While this intellectual sense is a great mystery, nonetheless there are elements of it that are evident enough. For example, both our physical and intellectual senses are guided by a sense of proportion, which helps us avoid walking into walls or driving off the road. It helps us hit a baseball or throw a pass. It helps us enjoy music and enables us to think.

Good sentences express the right proportion between words and between the realities they name: they tell the truth and they tell it true.

Evelyn Waugh is able to write euphonically while simultaneously writing noetically, or, if you like, in a manner that is intellectually pleasing. The reason this is so impressive is that a mind is much harder to please than an ear, if only because it has a broader and deeper relationship to reality.

Waugh writes well, which is a bit like saying Pavarotti sings well or Patrick Mahomes quarterbacks well.

Waugh can say, “All that January was intensely cold,” (and I can almost guarantee that you couldn’t have, as you have shown by your reaction, in which you were not as impressed by the sentence as you would have been if you were a more alert and careful writer), and he can also say, of the town where Crouchback was stationed, “It was a decent old place at the heart revealing concentric layers of later ugliness,” and then he can write this, about the “great promised event”: “Unconquerable they seemed to anyone ignorant of history, as they marched into the setting sun; straight, as anyone knowledgeable in highland geography could have told them, into the chilly waters of Loch Moidart.”

You should read Men at Arms because you love sentences that tell the truth truly.

Brilliant Story-Telling

You should also read Men at Arms because in it Waugh tells a great story, in the long tradition of great stories: stories that can be picked up by the semi-literate reader and read for pleasure, then frequently revisited by the thoughtful reader for its ironies, paradoxes, and seeming contradictions; for the lifted veils, the parted curtains, the drowned yachts.

Crouchback endures the vicissitudes of war with the British military and he does so with some degree of honour, but only occasionally in battle. Unknown at Claridge’s, he clubs at Bellamy’s with the old veterans of the Great War where wine might have been running in the streets, he grows a mustache and shaves it, he fails to seduce his wife, he “blots his copy book at Dakar”, and he might accidentally have killed a friend in his battalion.

Confronted over his possible role in his friend’s (Apthorpe’s) death, we read that “Guy left the office unashamed…. he was familiar with shame; this trembling, hopeless sense of disaster was something of a quite different order; something that would pass and leave no mark.”

As with that sentence, when you read Men At Arms, you will not find that the sentences, so beautifully written, leave you composed, at your toilette, hiding your flaws, lengthening your lashes. They will discompose you, even unsettle you, and you will love him for it because you too are open to reality and the growth it brings when we receive it. Your sedate yacht will hit the rock and you will thank him.

Read Men at Arms. I plan to revisit it myself this year as that awful, stupid, heartless, ugly war winds down in the spring of 1945, 80 years ago as I write. May we learn from their mistakes and may we learn to read and write like Evelyn Waugh.

1. A recusant is a Catholic in England who has managed to hold on to his property in spite of the centuries of Protestant persecution and exclusion of the Catholic church and families.