Men at Arms [Hardcover]

Evelyn Waugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1979

The first volume of Evelyn Waugh's masterful trilogy about war, religion, and politics.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

6 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

About the Author

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 and was educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). In 1945 he published Brideshead Revisited and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952 for Men at Arms. Evelyn Waugh died in 1966. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (Pap) (1979)
• ISBN-10: 0316926299
• ISBN-13: 978-0316926294
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,337,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Crusader Adrift In Britain's Finest Hour, January 27, 2004

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Men at Arms (Paperback)

Exile Guy Crouchback returns home to the United Kingdom on the eve of World War II, fully expecting a glorious self-immolation in the cause of all that is right and noble. Instead he is plunked into the middle of a farcical parade where tired gray men do the best they can to lose a war against a dangerous, devouring adversary while underlings move like spastic marionettes beneath bony fingers.

The result is no happy marriage for Guy, though happy marriages have not been his lot. He was married once, to a scheming heartbreaker named Virginia who divorced him for a career as a serial bride. Guy's strict Catholicism forbids him from marrying again, though as the last in his aristocratic line, such a situation means dereliction of duty in the posterity department. Stuck in every sense of the word, like Miniver Cheevy living mostly in the past, he views the onset of war as a means of redemption against the atheistic hordes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, aligned at the war's outset in the partition of Poland.

After a struggle, Guy finds himself enlisted in an army brigade where the golden mean is one of bare competence, and bureaucratic "banf" trumps all. France falls, and Norway, and the future is decidedly bleak. Whether Britain can ever rally is a point very much in doubt at book's end, though it doesn't seem likely Guy will help much.

That said, the first of Evelyn Waugh's "Sword Of Honor" is actually a pretty funny read most of the way through. The dialogue is crisp and clever; the plot twists ingenuously lurid. Author Evelyn Waugh has obvious fun recalling his own second youth (he enlisted in his mid-30s) and overseeing the zany exploits of his off-kilter comrades. While Guy spends a lot of time in the shadows, his emergence to be the subject of the later books, "Men At Arms" focuses on characters he meets who shed light on the various all-too-human traits of His Majesty's armed forces.

For example, brigade commander Ritchie-Hook is a one-eyed loon obsessed with attack and "biffing" the enemy. "There are no Sundays in the firing-line," he declaims. At one point, angered by his troops' inability at the shooting range, he runs over to the trench beneath the target butts, pokes his head up, and promises a reward to anyone who can nail him. They don't, maybe because they really try.

The book actually belongs to another character, Apthorpe, a strange, "rather rum" fellow who befriends Guy and in time enlists his aid on a mission to keep Ritchie-Hook from making use of Apthorpe's private "thunderbox," a.k.a. port-o-potty. This gets rather involved, with hushed nighttime conferences between Guy and Apthorpe that wind up somehow getting reported to British Intelligence, before the two conspirators' plot stumbles its way to a charged and highly entertaining conclusion.

If "Men At Arms" had ended there, it would be seen as an engagingly comic though perhaps shallow look at military service during the first and least nasty days of World War II, what would be called "The Phoney War." But Waugh, deeply scarred from his own wartime experiences, keeps the story moving into more penetrating territory. The comedy pulls up a bit, though not abruptly, and never completely.

Sometimes, when comedies turn serious, readers can be put off by the sharp change of tone. Yet here, even as laughs fall fainter, the reader's attachment increases, probably because Waugh subtly manipulates audience expectations (for example, by making Apthorpe less and less likeable, and the machinations of Guy's superiors more and more opaque) before messing with the storyline.

Also, Waugh's deeper involvement with all he presents here really shines through. This identification will only grow with the next two volumes, "Officers And Gentlemen" and "Unconditional Surrender," books that draw deeper focus on some real horrors of war only hinted at with "Men At Arms," while enriching characters first illustrated here with broader and less subtle strokes.

Talking about this book being an uproarious military comedy makes one think of something like "Stripes" or "M*A*S*H," which "Men At Arms" isn't by any stretch. It's no laugh riot, but neither is it a dull bore. Actually, it's very bright and invigorating. Like another Anglo-Catholic trilogy written at around the same time, "Sword Of Honour" is intimately concerned with the question of worldly goodness and overcoming the awesome threat posed by evil and doubt. No one is ever going to do with this trilogy what they did with the other and make gigillions with a three-part screen adaptation featuring hobbits and orcs. Yet "Sword Of Honour" with its real-world focus makes for an interesting counterpart to thoughtful readers who wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien drew upon when writing "Lord Of The Rings," or how people living through World War II viewed the conflict before the result was achieved and the mythology took over. "Men At Arms" makes for an inviting opening act.

By the way, a good way for reading this is in the company of David Cliffe's excellent trilogy companion, found at his Evelyn Waugh website at http://www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/home2.htm.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lost aristocrat, March 21, 2001

By 

a reader... (new york city) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Men at Arms (Paperback)

i've just finished all three novels in the 'sword of honor' trilogy: men at arms, officers and gentlemen and the end of the battle. not being a fan of satire, i've come late to waugh. to call him simply a writer of satire, as many persons do, is a serious literary mistake. these novels have comic and satiric flavors, but actually are quite serious, poignant, painful, and powerful. his technical style is understated and, thus deceptive in its weight.

the main character in all three novels, guy crouchback, is forced onto his privileged knees, and made to crawl to insight into the human condition, primarily to learn that war is only an occasionally more deadly mirror of peace, and that an absence of empathy is the start of it all. danger does not justify privilege for a man or a nation.

these are very sad, funny, wise, and deeply well written novels and i would highly recommend them.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A lighthearted look at British military life, February 16, 2002

By 

Dave Deubler (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Men at Arms (Paperback)

This is the first in the 'Sword of Honor' trilogy of novels by Waugh, describing one man's experience in the British military establishment. At the onset of WWII, divorced thirty-something Guy Crouchback anxiously longs to serve his country in its time of need, but can't find a branch of service that wants him. By the end of this book, his training completed, he begins to wonder if his country (represented by its armed forces) really knows what's good for it. This book is a fairly realistic and often rather lighthearted look at the training received by an officer of the Halberdiers during the early days of WWII, before the true terrors and horrors of that conflict had become apparent. This volume contains some fine portraits and vignettes from British army life, after which an officer's death and the questions of responsibility it raises cause Crouchback to doubt the wisdom of his beloved leaders.

Some of the more humorous moments include the incidents involving Apthorpe's port-a-john (not as disgusting as you might fear), Crouchback's attempted reconciliation with his wife, and the ego-driven absurdities that lead to the Brigadier's reconnaissance mission, but the humor is of the dry British
sort, with few of the belly laughs that make books like Catch 22 so unforgettable. Rather more to the point is the mildly biting satire exposing how ill prepared for war Britain really was at the time, particularly in light of the high price Europe paid for that negligence.

While this reviewer certainly enjoyed the book, its target audience is probably not as broad today as it would have been forty years ago. Veterans of the armed forces who are interested in a nostalgic look back at this era will probably get the most out of it, followed by admirers of the gentle art
of British humor, while on the other hand, women looking for romantic adventure will find very little femininity in the book, and Gen-Xers hoping to read another 'Catch 22' or 'MASH', will likely find the story dry and insipid. So don't go into this book looking for a comedy - it stands better as a fictionalized portrayal of a particular time and place in history.