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Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)

What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!
(Going Solo, page 92)

In my simplicity I had thought that Going Solo was an account of Roald Dahl’s time in the RAF in Africa; I hadn’t realised it is simply the continuation of his autobiography, which had begun with Boy: Tales from Childhood (1984), that it picks up precisely where that book ended, and that the RAF memoirs form only a part of the book.

To be precise, the text starts with Dahl setting off in 1938 at the age of 22 for his first job, a three-year contract with the Shell Oil company in East Africa. Little did he or anyone else know that the Second World War would break out only a year later and that Dahl would volunteer for, and be accepted into, the Royal Air Force.

The book therefore falls naturally into two halves: his experiences as a civilian in East Africa and the RAF period. This latter can itself be sub-divided into half a dozen or so parts:

  • training in Nairobi
  • more training in Iraq
  • his crash in the North African desert and the long hospitalisation and recovery which followed
  • fully recovered and returned to service for aerial combat in Greece
  • aerial combat over Vichy Syria

Before he becomes increasingly incapacitated by blinding headaches and is invalided home, arriving back at his mum’s house three years after he left, and that’s where the narrative ends.

I also hadn’t expected it to be a children’s book. Even Dahl’s ‘grown-up’ stories have an element of cartoon simplicity about them. They tend to be packed with eccentric characters who perform grotesque actions except that, in the ‘adult’ books, in the Tales of the Unexpected stories or a book like Uncle Oswald, these often involve sex. In this book there are, as you would expect, quite a few deaths, some pretty gruesome. And yet the same cartoon simplicity, the noticing of odd characters with silly names, the sense that situations and people are rounded and simple, is basically the same as he uses in his famous children’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and so on.

Thus the narrator of this book portrays himself as ‘a conventional young lad from the suburbs’ (p.3) and, in the Africa section especially, the main content focuses on the oddballs, eccentrics and freaks that he meets. This air of an innocent boy abroad in the crazy adult world is emphasised by two notable features of the text:

1. The way that each of the generally short chapters ends by including the text of one of the many, many letters he wrote home to his beloved Mother throughout the three year period, often repeating what we’ve just been told in the main text.

2. The photos. At various points Dahl tells us about cameras he’s bought (and which get stolen from him, as on a Greek airfield) and it’s clear he was a compulsive snapper. The book is liberally sprinkled with photos illustrating every step of his adventures, images which become increasingly dramatic when he sees action in Greece and which include photos of improvised airfields, crashed Messerschmitts and burned-out Hurricanes. The photos of him also bring out what a devilishly handsome young man he was, and freakishly tall, at a strapping six foot six.

Roald Dahl wearing flying helmet, goggles and scarf standing in front of a hedge

Roald Dahl aged 24 training to fly with the RAF in Nairobi

By ship to Tanganyika

In the opening chapters the narrator travels by ship, the SS Mantola, in the old, lazy style, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, but the focus isn’t on places and atmosphere or history. It is on the peculiar upper-class types who, back then, in the 1930s, ran the British Empire and were, without exception, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’. There’s Major Griffiths and his wife who, every morning, run round the ship’s deck stark naked to keep fit; the elderly Miss Trefusis who eats fruit with a knife and fork so as to avoid the beastly germs on one’s fingers; Dahl’s cabin-mate, the improbably named U.N. Savory, manager of a cotton mill in the Punjab who, it turns out, is bald but wears a series of four wigs, each thicker and fuller than the one before, in order to give the impression his luxuriant black hair is growing, before its monthly trim, all to impress the Sikhs he employs.

  • On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain (p.3)
  • Everyone on this ship was dotty (p.12)
  • The man was as potty as a pilchard. (p.19)

These chaps and chapesses had generated a special lingo, a dialect incorporating numerous words from Swahili, Hindi and so on.

  • sundowner = evening drink
  • chota peg = drink at any other time of day
  • the memsahib = the wife
  • a shufti = a look around
  • shenzi = poor quality
  • tiffin = supper

Dahl arrives in Dar es Salaam, the Red Sea port of what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania, which he describes as made up of small white and yellow and pink buildings set on a sweeping bay of golden sand against luxuriant tropical jungle. Wow. Reminder that it is 1938, before the world was ruined by over-population, tourism and pollution. The whole book is like this, conveying a fairytale sense of wonder and joy at everything Dahl sees and everyone he meets, he is continually reflecting:

what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it. (p.23)

The clarity of his prose and the untroubled enthusiasm of his schoolboy mentality makes this an extremely enjoyable book to read. Coming from such a modest background he doesn’t feel any class entitlement to the wonders of the Empire but is continually amazed and astonished at it – precisely as a schoolboy traveller back in time from our day might be.

Working for Shell in Dar es Salaam

Thus he is amazed to discover the Shell office in Dar es Salaam is run by just three Englishmen but set in a grand villa with an astonishing cohort of native servants, a cook, a gardener, and a ‘boy’ each. He is a personal valet who looks after every aspect of your clothes and shoes and rooms etc, but in return you were expected to look after him, his wives (at least two) and children. Dahl’s ‘boy’ is Mdisho. Dahl describes how one day he saved their ‘shamba-boy’ Salimu from being bitten by a black mamba snake and thus secured his undying loyalty.

He gets to be driven all around Tanganyika, visiting Shell customers in a wide range of farms and businesses, and revelling in the scenery and the wildlife, which is described as a boy would describe the wonders of a zoo, for there are lions! and hippos! and elephants! and zebra! Apart from the snakes. Dahl hates snakes.

Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! (p.44)

He is taking a sundowner on the terrace of a district officer, Robert Sanford, and his wife when a servant comes running round the corner of the house yelling that a lion is carrying away the cook’s wife. Sanford grabs a gun and gives chase so we have the comic sight of the lion loping along with cook’s wife between his jaws, chased by the cook, chased at a distance by Sanford brandishing his rifle, followed by Dahl wondering what he’s doing. Sanford fires a shot into the ground ahead of the lion who turns round and, seeing all these humans chasing him, drops the cook’s wife and canters off into the jungle. The cook’s wife is perfectly unharmed and gets to her feet smiling, and the whole crew return to the house where another drink is served and the cook gets on with preparing dinner.

Can this possibly have happened? Surely not as pat and neatly as he describes. The book is like this all the way through, perceived, imagined and written in the style of a crisp, clean children’s book. But, regarding this particular story, he goes on to write that the story became a legend and he was eventually asked to write up his version for the local paper, the East African Standard which paid him £5, his first published work. So maybe it did happen.

But whereas events like this in the hands of, say, Hemingway would have become a gripping insight into the eternal contest between man and beast, or in the hands of Graham Greene would have had a much messier ending involving someone’s adultery and guilt – under Dahl’s light touch it becomes a neat children’s story with a happy ending.

War breaks out

After a few more colonial adventures (the main one featuring ‘the snake man’, i.e. a little old European who specialises in catching poisonous snakes as and when they enter people’s homes) the Second World War breaks out on page 66 of this 223-page edition i.e. about a third of the way through.

To Dahl’s horror, he is conscripted by the captain of the King’s African Regiment and put in charge of a platoon of native soldiers (‘askaris’), armed with rifles each and one machinegun. He tells us that, as it had originally been a German colony (‘German East Africa’) there are far more German citizens in Tanganyika than all other European nationalities put together, and the army officer expects that, as soon as war is declared, all the Germans will try to escape on the one road which heads south towards Portuguese East Africa (nowadays called Mozambique). Dahl is ordered to stop them, and send them back to Dar where the men will be interned in a camp for the duration and the women and children remain free.

So he heads south in a lorry full of askaris. Like so many inexperienced young officers he has to rely on the experience of his (black) sergeant, who tells him where to stop and how to set up a roadblock. They camp for the night and the platoon cook makes a delicious meal of boiled rice and bananas.

Next day they get a phone call telling them war has, indeed, been declared and later that morning a convoy of German citizens in cars and vans arrives at the roadblock. In this account the German men get out of their cars holding guns and a young inexperienced Dahl finds himself confronted by the bullish leader of the convoy who refuses to return. He tells his comrades to start dismantling the roadblock and points his gun directly at Dahl. At which point a single rifle shot rings out and the man’s head explodes, his body falling to the road like a puppet. Dahl’s askaris emerge from their hiding places and the civilians mutely put down their guns, get in their cars and turn round, to be escorted to the camp by his lorryload of native soldiers (pages 59 to 70).

The thing is, in a story Dahl wrote a decade earlier, Lucky Break (1977), the shooting doesn’t happen. The Germans meekly turn around and return to Dar. Is this later version the true, unabridged version of events? Or a deliberately more violent and garish version, reflecting the uninhibited nature of culture as a whole, which became steadily more interested in graphic violence from the 1970s onwards? Or an old man (Dahl was 70 when this memoir was published) enjoying giving his readers the shivers?

Dahl joins the RAF and trains

In December 1939 Dahl enrols in the RAF. His employer, Shell, release him and continue to pay his salary for the duration of his service (!).

Dahl gives a beautifully boyish description of the long solitary drive from Dar up to Nairobi in Kenya, stopping to marvel at giraffes and elephants.

At Nairobi he is quickly inducted and taught to fly a Tiger Moth, which you started by swinging the big wooden propeller by hand, making sure not to topple forwards because then it would chop your head off. The text radiates boyish glee in the macabre and violent.

How many young men, I kept telling myself, were lucky enough to be allowed to go whizzing and soaring through the sky above a country as beautiful as Kenya? (p.90)

Once he can fly he is sent by train to Kampala, flown to Cairo, which was lovely, and then on to Habbaniya in Iraq, ‘the most godforsaken hellhole in the whole world’ (p.94) where he spends six months, from 20 February to 20 August 1940 (p.98) training in Hawker Harts.

Finally he ‘gets his wings’ and is transferred to RAF Ismailia on the Suez Canal, and posted to 80 Squadron, who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. He is boyishly fascinated by the way the Gladiator’s two fixed machineguns fire bullets through a propeller rotating at thousands of times per minute (p.99).

He is stunned to be told no-one is going to show him either how to fly a Gladiator nor anything at all about aerial combat. He’s just going to be plonked in one and given the map co-ordinates of 80 Squadron and told to make his way there by himself. Here he makes the first of what become many comments and criticisms about the RAF and army’s lack of imagination and planning.

There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and that, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. (p.101)

He crashes

Dahl is at pains to point out that, although it was reported in the press that he was shot down by enemy planes, this was propaganda cooked up to make the incident sound patriotic.

On 19 September Dahl was ordered to fly his new Gladiator from RAF Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. He refuelled at Amariya near Alexandria and flew on to Fouka. It is mind-boggling to learn that he had no radio and only a map strapped to his knee for guidance. The CO at Fouka gave him the co-ordinates of his final destination, the current 80 Squadron base, and he set off. But it wasn’t there. He flew up and down and round and round looking for it, as the desert dusk drew in and he ran short of fuel. He realised he had to make an emergency landing, tried to find a flat long stretch of desert and took the Gladiator down.

The plane hit a boulder at about 75 miles an hour. He regained consciousness to discover his nose was smashed, his skull fractured, he’d lost a few teeth and he couldn’t see. In one of the most vivid parts of the book, he describes the incredibly lethargy he felt, he just wanted to sleep, but the plane was on fire and eventually the scorching heat persuaded him to undo his straps and reluctantly leave the nice cosy cockpit and crawl onto the sand. Here he just wanted to curl up and sleep but, again, the fierce heat persuaded him reluctantly to crawl away towards the cool desert night.

Later he discovered the area he crashed in was no man’s land between the Italian and British front lines and that three brave British soldiers ventured out after nightfall to check the wreckage and were surprised to find the pilot had survived. They carried him back to British lines and thence began the long, complicated journey back to hospital in Alexandria.

Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Alexandria

In his clear, boyish style, Dahl vividly describes his prolonged hospital treatment. He spends around six months recovering from his injuries, under the care of the hospital staff, in particular nurse Mary Welland whose gentle ministrations to the swollen flesh around his eyes is calming and reassuring. He has various operations, including an adventure with a spanking new anaesthetic, sodium pentathol, which turns out not to work at all (pages 112 to 116).

Then one day, as Mary is laving his swollen eyes, one opens a crack and light floods in. For six weeks he had been blind, his other senses heightened. The return of light is a revelation (pages 118 to 122).

Dahl was discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after he was admitted, and goes to stay with a wealthy English family in Cairo, the Peels.

When he reports to RAF Ismailia he is told 80 Squadron are now in Greece, and are no longer flying Gladiators, but Mark I Hurricanes. Once again he is thrown in the deep end, given just two days solo practice, the first time he’d flown a modern, super-speedy plane, the first plane with retractable undercarriage, with wing flaps, with a variable pitch propeller, with machineguns in the wings, that he’s ever flown.

Two days to teach himself then he’s ordered to fly solo across the Med to Greece. The Flight-Lieutenant tells him they’re fitting it with extra fuel tanks, but if the pump doesn’t work, he’ll run out and be forced to ditch in the sea. Then swim home.

Fighting in Greece

As soon as he lands his Hurricane at Elevsis airfield near Athens, the ground crew set him straight about the parlous situation. The entire RAF has just 15 Hurricanes and four clapped-out Blenheims. Dahl explains the background: the Italians invaded Greece in October 1940 but ran into unexpected resistance. The British government took a vital slice of Field-Marshall Wavell’s Eighth Army and planes and sent them to Greece in March 1941. When it was just the Italians to hold off, this was fine. But on 6 April 1941 the Germans invaded and began a steady advance which was to bring them to Athens just three weeks later on 27 April. The German Luftwaffe outnumbered the measly little RAF outfit by anything up to 100 to 1.

So Dahl had flown into an utterly hopeless situation, and the pilots and ground crew let him know it straightaway. Sending British forces to Greece had been a colossal miscalculation. Now the best that could be hoped for was managing their withdrawal. It was like Dunkirk but was being hushed up in the press.

Dahl immediately made friends with David Coke, in line to inherit the title Earl of Leicester, who is appalled to learn that Dahl has absolutely no idea about air combat whatsoever. Over a couple of pages he fills Dahl (and the reader) in on the basics.

There follow a sequence of absolutely thrilling and terrifying descriptions of aerial warfare. On his first flight he takes on a pack of 6 Junker 88s, apparently downing one but making every mistake in the book. The Squadron CO barely looks up when he tells him. Every day more men and planes are being lost. In the small ‘mess’ there are no friendships, people don’t talk. They are all alone with their thoughts, convinced they will all die within days.

Next day he tries to defend a British ammunition ship from attack, engaging with Stukas and being chased by what he says felt like 30 or so Messerschmitts to avoid which he descends right down to tree level, then fence level, terrifyingly dangerous. Did this actually happen or is the professional author in Dahl giving the reader a thrill for their money? It’s noticeable how many times he directly addresses the reader, as if in one of his children’s books:

You may not believe it but I can remember having literally to lift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was a herd of brown cows in front of me and I’m not sure I didn’t clip some of their horns with my propeller as I skimmed over them. (p.153)

There follows a chapter packed with incident as he details the four consecutive days leading up to the Battle of Athens:

  • 17 April he went up 3 times
  • 18 April went up twice
  • 19 April went up 3 times
  • 20 April went up 4 times

They try to defend ships in Piraeus harbour from German bombers. On 20th the entire squadron of 12 Hurricanes is sent up to fly over Athens to try and bolster morale, led by legendary air ace Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle, but of course the Germans send hundreds of Messerchmitts after them and it turns into a mad bloodbath. His description of the intensity of split second perceptions required continually is amazing.

Dahl survives but five of the 12 Hurricanes were lost. After he lands he finds he is drenched in sweat. His hands are shaking too much to light a cigarette. He has stripped and is washing alongside his friend David when the airfield is strafed by Me 109s.

Amazingly all seven planes survive and the Messerschmitts don’t return, probably expecting the little airfield to be heavily defended, not knowing it is only protected by one measly Bofors gun.

Next thing Dahl and the other 6 are ordered to fly to a new landing strip along the coast, near Megara. The existing ground crew will decamp with all tents etc that evening. Next morning the seven pilots awaken to a camp stripped almost bare. There’s no mess tent, no cooks, no food. As dawn breaks they climb into their planes, assemble at 1,000 feet and fly down the coast to Megara.

They land in a field which has been rolled flat. There is absolutely no-one else about. They wheel the planes into the cover of olive trees and climb a ridge from where they can see the sea. There’s a large oil tanker 500 yards out. They watch as Stukas dive bomb it, blow it into a fireball, and watch as the crew leap off into the flaming water and are roasted alive (pages 174 to 175).

The ground crew and other ancillaries arrive in lorries and set up tents. Again the pilots ask why the devil they’re not being sent straight to Egypt. They conclude it’s so that propagandists/the Press/the government can claim that the RAF stayed till the bitter end to protect ‘our troops’. Words like ‘mess’, ‘balls-up’, ‘muddle headed’, ‘incompetent’, ‘terrific cock-up’ sprinkle the text. The Commanding Officer unhappily tells them they have to stay.

A flight of Messerschmitts flies over. Their new base has been rumbled. They calculate they have an hour and a half before a bombing raid returns but the commanding officer idiotically refuses to let them take off and be prepared. Instead they must wait till 6pm on the dot and then fly off to cover the evacuation of troops. a) this gives the Germans exactly the right amount of time to return and shoot up the new airbase, killing one pilot in his plane as it is taking off and b) when they get to the location where they’re told they’re meant to be protecting the troops, there’s nothing there: no troops, no ships. In actuality the troops were being disembarked down the coast at Kalamata where they were being massacred by Ju 88s and Stukas. Another complete cock-up.

When they return from this pointless errand they find the new landing base has indeed been heavily bombed and have to land in smoke. In a hurry the Adjutant finally orders five other pilots to fly the five remaining Hurricanes to Crete, all other pilots to take a lorry and cram into a de Havillande Rapide. This includes Dahl. He carries his Log Book and crams in next to his buddy David.

Two hours later they land in the Western Desert and catch a truck back to Alexandria where the superbly well-mannered Major Peel and his wife immediately put their entire mansion at the disposal of nine filthy, hungry, smelly, penniless pilots.

‘The whole thing was a cock-up,’ someone said.
‘I think it was,’ Bobby Peel said. ‘We should never have gone to Greece at all.’ (p.195)

Although whether Bobby Peel actually said that, or even existed, is a moot point, given the neat roundedness of so many of the facts and anecdotes in this account.

So what comes over very powerfully indeed is the stupidity and futility of the short-lived British expedition to Greece. On the last page of this section Dahl gives his opinion straight, which is that diverting troops and planes from the African desert to Greece fatally weakened the Eighth Army and condemned it to years of defeats against the Germans under Rommel who at one stage threatened Cairo and thus the entire Middle East. It took two years for the British Army’s strength to be rebuilt sufficiently for them to drive Rommel and the Italians back into Tunisia and ultimately win the war in the desert.

Fighting in Syria

Lebanon and Syria were French colonies. When the Vichy government came to power in France, the French forces in Lebanon and Syria switched to the Vichy side and became fanatically pro-German and anti-British. They could obviously provide beachheads for the Germans to land in the Middle East and so threaten a) our oil supplies from Iraq b) the Suez Canal, our gateway to India (and large numbers of Indian troops). Which is why there was a bitter and hard-fought battle for control of Lebanon and Syria which pitched British, Australian and South African forces against the Vichy French.

In May 1941 80 Squadron were redeployed to Haifa in northern Palestine. They consisted of 9 pilots and Hurricanes and their task was to protect the Royal Navy as it pounded Lebanon’s ports. Dahl briefly describes a series of run-of-the-mill sorties, during which 4 of the 9 pilots were killed.

He spends much more time describing a solo mission he was sent on, to go, land and reconnoitre a satellite landing field 30 miles away. Here he discover a strip of land which has been flattened but has absolutely no other facilities whatsoever. It is ‘manned’ by one tall old man and a surprising legion of children.

It’s a peculiar scene, whose sole point is that the old man and the children are Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Dahl goes out of his way to demonstrate his naivety on the Jewish Question, and emphasises that he has been totally out of touch with European news for 2 years, and so simply doesn’t know about the escalating Nazi attacks on Jews (p.208). Which explains why he doesn’t understand what the man means when he says that he and the children are refugees, and really doesn’t understand it when the man says this is his country. What, you’re going to become a Palestinian, asks Dahl in his naivety. But the man is clearly a Zionist, clearly a believer that the Jews have a right to a homeland the same as every other nation on earth, and clearly believes that he and his comrades are going to build that homeland right here, in Palestine. Dahl is ‘flabbergasted’ at his attitude and, maybe, this is a good indicator of the lack of understanding of many British people and armed forces during and immediately after the war, as the Jews’ struggle to establish the homeland of Israel reached its climax.

Demobilised and return to England

Dahl continues dutifully flying missions from the Haifa base but during the month of June 1941 begins to suffer increasingly intense headaches, including ones which lead him to black out. The base medical officer reads his history, particularly the fractured skull from his crash, and orders him to cease flying. He is demobilised, takes a bus back to Cairo, catches a luxury liner to South Africa, then a troop ship which makes the perilous journey up the west coast of Africa, threatened by enemy planes but especially U-boats, eventually docking in Liverpool.

From here he makes phone calls to relatives and discovers his mother’s house in Kent was bombed out and so she’s bought a cottage in rural Buckinghamshire. It’s worth reminding that every few pages of this text includes excerpts from the letters he wrote to his mother regularly as clockwork throughout this period. Cumulatively, these convey a very close bond between mother and son. He catches a train to London, stays overnight at a relative’s place in Hampstead, then catches a train and a bus to his mother’s village, steps down from the bus and into his mother’s waiting arms, and it is with this moment that this exciting, eye-opening, boyish and fresh-faced memoir comes to a dead halt.

Credit

Going Solo by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. All references are to the 2018 Centenary Collection Penguin paperback edition.

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Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955)

Tommy Blackhouse declared: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.’
(Officers and Gentlemen, page 47)

Officers and Gentleman is the second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. As its predecessor, Men at Arms was divided into three parts with a prologue and epilogue, so Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two halves, ‘Happy Warriors’ (London and Scotland) and ‘In The Picture’ (Egypt and Crete), with a small interlude and an epilogue.

Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is entirely about the army and the adventures in it of the trilogy’s dour, self-conscious, 35-year-old, divorced, Catholic ‘hero’, Guy Crouchback – and yet the majority of the book features no fighting. Instead, like its predecessor, it is overwhelmingly about the absurdities of army bureaucracy, politicking and infighting, with a fair admixture describing the absurdities of civilian life during war.

Indeed, the larger presence of scenes of civilian life, in the form of the social circle of Guy’s former wife, Virginia, in London, and of the legendary Mrs Julia Stitch in Alexandria (when the action moves, in the second half, to Egypt)shifts the style and feel of the book noticeably back towards the more obviously silly social satire of Waugh’s 1930s comedies.

Book One – Happy Warriors

The previous novel ended with Guy aboard a flying boat carrying him back from Sierra Leone to England. Officers and Gentlemen opens on the evening of the same day. Guy arrives in the afternoon and makes his way straight to London in time for a big air raid during the Blitz. The novel opens with Guy standing on the steps of his London club, Bellamy’s, admiring the night sky over London lit up by German bombers, explosions, searchlights and anti-aircraft flak, quite a show of fireworks.

Stiff upper lip

Part of the humour derives from the stiff upper lip detachment of most of the characters and the narrator. This sense of ironic detachment is apparent from the opening scene. For many Londoners the Blitz was a time of terror and tragedy. Waugh completely transmutes it into a festival of fun. It’s there in individual sentences:

Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

In sardonic satire:

On the pavement opposite Turtle’s a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning-room.

Or in the extended comic tone of the opening scene when members of Bellamys watch the rival club, Turtles, down the road, burning merrily, and then confront a bedlam of rumours that wine and brandy are flowing in the gutters, the comic spectacle of the night porter, Job, having drink far too much and attempting to keep a straight face and voice, and the farcical spectacle of Ian Kilbannock’s superior officer, an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, hiding from German bombs under the club billiard table.

At the end of the Evelyn Waugh Wikipedia article, his lifelong friend Nancy Mitford is quoted as saying: ‘What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.’

Apthorpe’s last request

A central figure of Men at Arms was the often absurd figure of Apthorpe. In hospital and knowing he was dying, Apthorpe made Guy promise to carry out his dying wish and take his legendary collection of kit and equipment to a chap called ‘Chatty’ Corner (real name, James Pendennis). Apthorpe had brought this chap to a drunken dinner given by the regiment he and Guy are both members of, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Waugh expresses it with characteristic levity:

A spirit was to be placated. Apthorpe’s gear must be retrieved and delivered before Guy was free to follow his fortunes in the King’s service. His road lay backward for the next few days, to Southsand and Cornwall. ‘Chatty’ Corner, man of the trees, must be found, somewhere in the trackless forests of wartime England.

This is the rather slender pretext for the first half of the book which is Guy’s quest to track down this ‘Chatty’ fellow and hand over Apthorpe’s huge pile of clobber.

Recurring characters

In the first novel there was quite an array of characters, who kept changing with the changing configuration of Guy’s regiment. In this novel the focus is a bit more on civilian life and so it feels like there’s a smaller number of characters who keep recurring up. These include:

  • Ian Kilbannock – early in the war wangled himself a job in the RAF and, during the course of this book, gets himself a cosy niche as information officer
  • Tommy Blackhouse – the man Guy’s wife, Virginia, left him for, but they’ve both gotten over this, Tommy is a member of Guy’s club, Bellamy’s, so they keep bumping into each other and the central event of part one is when Guy finds himself seconded to the commando group Tommy is commanding in Scotland
  • Virginia aka Mrs Troy, shallow-minded socialite ex-wife of Guy’s (‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia’, p.78)
  • Arthur Box-Bender – Conservative MP married to Guy’s sister, Angela, successful if often obtuse older man in his 50s
  • Miss Vavasour – the concerned old lady who resides in the same hotel as Guy’s father in the seaside resort of Matchet (his daughter, Angela, has dropped hints that she might be in love with him)

Guy spends that night in a hotel then next day Guy takes a train from Charing Cross and reports at the Royal Halberdier barracks. No one is expecting him or knows what to do with him. Guy explains his quest to find Chatty Corner to the Adjutant who promptly gives him some leave, so Guy turns right round, gets a taxi to the station and back to London.

Guy’s father and the Cuthberts

There is a prolonged storyline concerning Guy’s father. Years ago he had been forced to quit the old family home at Broome, let it to a convent, and settled as a long-term resident in a hotel in the coast town of Matchet. The storyline concerns the narrow-minded, uncharitable and profiteering attempts of the owners of the hotel, the Cuthberts, to eject Mr Crouchback from his room and make a lot more money charging it out by the week at the new higher wartime rates.

The general purpose of this recurring storyline is to emphasise what a jolly decent old buffer Guy’s father is (‘He was a man of regular habit and settled opinion. Doubt was a stranger to him.’) and what a thoroughly mean-spirited and greedy lot the horrid working class Cuthberts are.

His daughter, Guy’s sister, Angela, has three daughters by her husband, Box-Bender. All three have been evacuated to the safety of New England. From there they have sent a package containing American products which Mr Crouchback can’t make head or tail of.

He receives a letter from Angela enclosing a message they’ve had from Tony, her only son, who surrendered along with his regiment at Dunkirk and is now in a German prisoner of war camp.

Meanwhile wheels are moving. The Prime Minister, no less, orders that Brigadier Ritchie-Hook be rehabilitated. Along the complex hierarchy of bureaucracy this urge to find something for him to do spins off to affect Guy. Orders are drawn up for him to attend HOO HQ. These are top secret and must be delivered by hand. Who is there to deliver them? Well, old ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, a superannuated retired Colonel who returned to the barracks as soon as war broke out and has been hanging round under-employed ever since. He’s only too happy to be given something to do, namely sit in a car driven by an army driver all the way to the Marine Hotel Matchet where Guy is known to be taking his leave.

And thus Jumbo Trotter enters the lives of not only Guy but his father. For when he arrives in Matchet it rather inevitably turns out that he knows Mrs Tickeridge, wife of the colonel who resides at the hotel along with Guy’s father and was, in fact the man who wangled him a post in the Halberdiers.

The arrival of Jumbo overlaps with the storyline about the Cuthberts wanting to oust Mr Crouchback from the hotel because they have progressed as far as getting a Quartering Commandant, a Major Grigshawe, to force him to leave so his rooms can be taken by more ‘important’ (and higher paying) guests. But Jumbo knows this man Grigshawe, spots him in the bar, calls his name, Grigshawe jumps to attention, and Jumbo has a few words with him which result in Mr Crouchback’s future at the hotel being assured. All without Mr Crouchback knowing it even happened. Why? Because as soon as Mrs Tickeridge introduces Jumbo to Guy’s father, Jumbo recognises him as  ‘a good type’; not only the father of a Halberdier but a man fit to be a Halberdier himself. Contacts.

Anyway, you can see why describing this as a ‘war novel’ would be very misleading. For long stretches it’s more of a comic novel about civilian life during wartime.

Guy’s quest

Meanwhile Guy’s quest takes him to some of the barracks the Halberdiers were posted to in the first book. At Brook Park he collects a stash Apthorpe had left, before moving on to Southsand where the Commodore of the Yacht Club is only too glad to be relieved of three taxis’ worth of clutter Apthorpe had left there. And here Guy finds himself becalmed because military orders had it that no soldier should carry more than a haversack. He had assembled all Apthorpe’s gear alright, but isn’t allowed to move it. All Souls Day, 2 November 1940, comes and goes and, ‘ever prone to despond’, Guy broods.

Finally Jumbo Trotter arrives, having tracked him down, and delivers his secret message ‘by hand’. It is instructions to report to HOO HQ at Marchmain House, London. Now this is a tiny but significant detail because readers of Brideshead Revisited will remember that the family title was Marchmain, that their London house was called Marchmain House, and that old Lord Marchmain had been obliged to sell the house to developers who knocked it down and built a block of modern flats. Well, this is the same place, the top floors having been commandeered by Hazardous Offensive Operations (HOO) Headquarters. It’s not only an example of the way all of Waugh’s fictional oeuvre inhabits the same ‘universe’ with multiple cross-references and recurring characters, but also an indication of the way Officers and Gentlemen is a bit more tied into his pre-war comedies than Men at Arms.

Anyway, here occurs one of the many comic misunderstandings which litter Waugh’s stories. Guy tells him that the secret message instructed him to report to London, but he has a devil of a lot of kit. He takes Jumbo to see the kit and Jumbo is suitably impressed:

Together they visited the baggage store and stood in silence before the heap of steel trunks, leather cases, brass-bound chests, shapeless canvas sacks, buffalo-hide bags. Jumbo was visibly awed. He himself believed in ample provision for the emergencies of travel. Here was something quite beyond his ambition. (p.42)

Because Guy doesn’t explain about Apthorpe, Jumbo thinks all this kit is part of a top secret mission Guy is on. Therefore he pulls strings and secures the services of a five ton truck and driver and next morning all this kit is loaded into it and they are driven to London.

When Guy finally reports to a functionary of HOO HQ in Marchmain House, he is told he is being sent  on temporary attachment for training purposes to X Commando on the (fictional) Scottish Isle of Mugg, where he will report to Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who, by huge coincidence, the reader will remember, is the man who took Guy’s wife away from him.

When he hears the news Jumbo is thrilled and offers to come with him, extending the use of the three-ton lorry and RASC driver has found him. So they head north.

The Isle of Mugg

After several overnight stops, they arrive at Inverness, where the ferry for Mugg departs. Jumbo volunteers to stay on the mainland with the lorry and Apthorpe’s gear, while Guy takes the ferry to the island.

Once on the little island, Guy makes his way to the only hotel where he’s told the commando is posted. Here he finds Ivor Claire, the famous international horserider (who won medals with his mount, Thimble). After chat with him, Trimmer enters. We know him from the first book, where he was an unpopular officer. Here again he is much disliked, but is masquerading as a Scotsman and (indicative of his slipperiness) is calling himself McTavish. Trimmer is not actually as part of the commando, his regiment were sent to Iceland but he’d sprained a wrist and stayed on here.

Trimmer tells him it’s a small world because a chap’s there who was at the Halberdiers’ guest night the night Guy sprained his knee and, by a massive and implausible coincidence, Chatty Corner is there. Up here his nickname is Kong, short for King Kong. Trimmer offers to take Guy across to his digs, which turn out to be the ‘Old Castle’ a walk away through freezing night along a sheet ice path. And indeed James Pendennis Corner is inside, nursing a heavy cold, wrapped in blankets, with his feet in a mustard bath. He explains he was an old Africa expert, that’s he got to know Apthorpe, and came back as soon as war broke out and began to give Africa training but after Dunkirk somehow the army got it into its head that he knew about mountaineering so they sent him here to teach it. He’s a big hairy man who likes climbing up things, and that’s the reason for the nickname King Kong.

With delight in his heart, Guy gets Corner/Kong to sign a document officially taking ownership of Apthorpe’s stuff. His legal and moral debt is paid. It is, in the chronology of the novels, 7 December 1940.

Back at the hotel Tommy invites Guy to dinner with the old laird, Mugg, who lives in the new castle. It is a spectacular comic passage as they make their way through to the snow and ice to the impressive pile, where the door is opened to the deafening sound of bagpipes. The laird is obsessed with dynamite, he thinks the way to transform the island’s economy is to blast away the tons of rock covering what was once a lovely sandy beach pipes at dinner (later the laird takes Guy on tour of the island and explains it was he who dynamited the old stables and caused the rockfall which has buried the beach). Over the very tough and indigestible venison, he is introduced to the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael who is an ardent Scottish nationalist and so a vehement supporter of Hitler.

Next day Tommy finds the letter sending Guy to Mugg but sadly says he isn’t to become one of them, he is assigned to Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, once he’s better. Meanwhile what Tommy really needs is an old hand who knows his way round the system. Guy describes Jumbo, and Tommy leaps at the opportunity of nabbing him for his commando, and dispatches Guy back to the mainland to fetch him.

Trimmer gets leave and goes to Glasgow. Waugh doesn’t like Trimmer. Here he is among the crowds at the station hotel:

He passed on with all the panache of a mongrel among the dustbins, tail waving, ears cocked, nose a-quiver. (p.73)

In an upmarket place, the Restaurant de Madrid, with another tremendous coincidence, Trimmer bumps into Virginia, Mrs Troy, Guy’s ex-wife. At one point in his career slippery Trimmer was the hairdresser on an ocean liner, the Aquitania, going under the name of Gustave, and used to regularly do her hair and give her a massage. They get talking and Virginia is perfectly prepared to leave behind the crowded, sordid world of the current war in memories of happier times aboard luxury cruise liners. They have dinner then go back to her hotel room.

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

There is a comic running thread, which kicked off in the first book and runs through this one, about a top secret intelligence unit based in London, led by this Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, which gathers intelligence from all over. It gained stray information about Guy and Apthorpe to open a file on him, completely misinterpreting the various events that happen to him, and interpreting them in a sinister light as if Guy is involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy.

In a way it is a distillation or exaggeration of the misinterpreting, distancing effect of gossip which I have identified as a key element in Waugh’s fiction. It is also a satire on the conspiracy theory mindset:

Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war. (p.79)

After four days of sensual bliss, Trimmer runs into the commanding officer he thought was far away in Iceland in the hotel bar. The man is incredulous and inclined to be angry, Trimmer makes up a cock and bull story about having been co-opted into the commando, manages to get away, and tells a not very surprised Virginia that he has to leave straightaway. He hastily writes a letter to Tommy actually requesting to join the commando. Jumbo and Guy see this, and advise against it.

The commando begin training in earnest for a landing on a Mediterranean island. Claire cheats in a night-time exercise to travel to a spot 12 miles distant, by commandeering a civilian bus and getting there before any other squad. This irks all the other officers involved in the exercise and, in his isolation, pushes Claire towards deeper friendship with Guy. They both feel like outsiders.

Trimmer returns and Tommy finds a place for him with a group loosely called ‘Specialists’. The head of this, Major Graves, says Trimmer can have charge of his sappers. A few days later Guy calls in on the laird and realises he’s been chatting to Trimmer. Thinks him an awful fake but he is in charge of the sappers and so has access to the laird’s obsession, explosives, so they are becoming matey. The laird takes him out to the cliffs to show him the spot where he dynamited the old cliffs onto the beach.

Guy has a surreal encounter with a tall, wild hatless man on the beach who turns out to be an expert in dietetics, Dr Glendening-Rees, a forager avant la lettre who’s been sent there by HOO HQ and is going to recommend to the troop that they abandon their usual diet and try to survive on limpets, seaweed and heather roots. It is decided that Trimmer and his little troop of sappers will be the victims of this experiment so they are dispatched into the wilds under the direction of Dr Glendening-Rees.

Improbably, surreally, a luxury yacht appears off the island, the Cleopatra. It used to belong to the famed socialite Mrs Julia Stitch (who played a pivotal role in the earlier novel, Scoop), but she is nowhere in sight. Instead it has been commandeered by a troop of top brass, consisting of Tommy Blackhouse, an admiral, General Whale, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Even Ian Kilbannock is included. He comes ashore, Guy takes him for lunch and he explains he finally escaped his dreaded Air Marshall and has got a new job as press liaison.

Navy ships arrive. For several days there is speculation. Tommy is told they are embarking on a ship-borne exercise and makes detailed plans. But this is a decoy. Once all the men from the various troops of the commando are aboard ship it is announced there will be no exercise. Instead they are sailing for real combat. They are to be collectively titled ‘Hookforce’.

Before embarking Tommy had an uncomfortable interview with Jumbo where he told him he wouldn’t be wanted. Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke had specifically said no, too old. Instead he is to report to HOO HQ in London. Ritchie-Hooke has personal command over Guy who has been given a role as Intelligence Officer.

The ships sail before trimmer and his little squad of sappers stagger back into Mugg town, haggard and unshaven after their seven-day experiment living wild in heather.

Interlude in South Africa

February 1941. Nine weeks after embarking, the three ships carrying the commando battalions have docked at Cape Town which, with its blazing lights at night and shops full of nice products is the opposite of blackout rationed Britain. It’s nine weeks since they left Mugg but four of them were spent ashore on Scapa Flow while Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke put them through training, up ‘biffing’ the surrounding hills day and night. The ships are taking the long way round Africa to the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

Guy has become even more friendly and confidential with Ivor Claire. They have a leisurely conversation in the hotel bar, then wandering round the streets, then back at the hotel, and then in the garden under the southern stars, which is actually a stylish way for Waugh to drop in the backstory of what happened in the intervening weeks.

Colonel Tommy turns up with the bad news that Ritchie-Hooke and the Brigade Major took off by plane from Brazzaville and haven’t been heard of since, presumed crashed, presumed dead.

A couple of fellow officers, Eddie and Bertie, spent the afternoon getting drunk, then trying to sober up again in order to take out a couple of young ladies, then they turn up back on the ship at the end of the evening, walking round the deck trying to sober up while, paradoxically, swigging from a bottle of powerful local liquor they’ve bought because it was named ‘Kommando’.

Book Two: In the Picture

Waugh shows how at a meeting of the top brass in Easter 1941, several further incidents involving the commandos (referred to as Special Service Forces) were reviewed, all of them unfortunate, such as the way that a) they lost their brigadier, Ritchie-Hooke b) when they arrived at the Suez Canal it was closed and c) when the canal was cleared their ships were commandeered to ferry Australian troops to Greece.

Major-General Whale, Director of Land Forces and nicknamed ‘Sprat’, defends his boys and manages to avoid getting them broken up. But he returns to his office aware they need to achieve a success of some kind, preferably one which can be promoted by the Ministry of Information in the press. He calls together his senior planners and asks them to recommend something which can achieve a quick win. Someone digs up ‘Operation Popgun’, a small assault on an unmanned island near Jersey.

Sprat approves it and tells Ian Kilbannock (who is now his chief information officer) it will be led by this MacTavish chap (who we also know as Trimmer) who’s in charge of the sappers unit (we saw how casual his appointment was back on Mugg.

Then the narrative cuts back to our hero, Guy, as he wakes in the commando’s temporary base in Sidi Bishr, then in the desert just outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Guy is still Intelligence Officer, Tommy Blackhouse is Deputy Commander with the acting rank of full colonel, and a new character is introduced, a small, bald, youngish man named Hound who is the Brigade Major. Major Hound does not like the irregular setup and behaviour of the commandos:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Reading this little sequence about official disapproval of the commandos suddenly made me realise why Waugh was drawn to make them central to his big war trilogy – because they are unconventional, because there’s more scope for mischief, anarchy and comedy.

After some business establishing the fractious relations between Guy, Hound (who disapproves of the entire commando), Major Graves (who thinks he ought to be in command of X commando) and a new member of the commando, pale-eyed, journal-keeping Corporal-Major Ludovic, Tommy sends Guy into Alexandria to check up on Ivor Claire who managed to trip over a tent rope and twist his knee and chosen to instal himself in a private nursing home.

En route he drops into a Catholic church to make confession to a French priest who seems to ask rather too many questions about Guy’s brigade. Guy thinks he’s a spy and tries to track him down to the local clergy-house but gets no joy from the Arab doorman.

When he visits Ivor in his private hospital the latter informs him that the egregious Mrs Julia Stitch is in town, a one-woman dynamo of high socialising and bravado behaviour. She once visited the Castello Crouchback on her yacht with some very posh friends. Now, nearly 10 years later, she remembers it perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly. She is a comic prodigy.

Kissing Claire goodbye, she dragoons Guy into her car and for a mad drive across Alexandria, stopping at random moments and blocking all the traffic in order to point out to Guy ancient sites mentioned in the rare copy of E.M. Foster’s guide to Alexandria which she is reading. (Readers of Scoop will remember that, in that book, she drives a kind of baby motor car which she manages to drive into a downstairs men’s public lavatory.) Here she upsets all the local drivers and, in quest of a shoe shop she’s been told about, drives down an alleyway which becomes too narrow her car becomes wedged fast in it.

She obtains the shoes, or rather carpet slippers, she wants then forces Guy to hurry to catch a taxi back to the villa she and her husband have been assigned a little outside of town. It is a typical Stitch luncheon party, featuring a the Commander-in-Chief, a young Maharaja in the uniform of the Red Cross, a roving English cabinet minister, and an urbane pasha, and two little local millionairesses, sisters, who hang on Mrs Julia Stitch’s every word, comically misinterpreting them. They think Guy must be her lover, only reason such a lowly undistinguished officer could be there.

This leads to the comic incident whereby, when lunch is over, the Commander-in-Chief (presumably of the entire army in North Africa) offers Guy a lift back to his base and even directs his driver to go right into the base and drop him at his barracks – to the initial disbelief of captious Major Hound.

It is Holy Saturday, 12 April 1941. We know this because there is a brief description of Guy’s father, venerable old Mr Crouchback, breaking his lenten fast with lunch, a pint of burgundy and a luxurious pipe.

Kerstie Kilbannock

The scene suddenly cuts back to London, to describe the life of Kerstie Kilbannock, dutiful wife of Ian Kilbannock who we’ve met as information officer to Special Service Forces. Kerstie has taken two friends named Brenda and Zita into her house in (very smart) Eaton Terrace as paying guests, and to work alongside her, unpaid, in the canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District. When she meets Virginia Troy at the Dorchester Hotel during an air raid, visibly hard up, she invites her to come and join the female menage.

Kerstie tells Virginia about a regular customer, a quite frightfully awful man they’ve nicknamed ‘Scottie’ and the reader is not altogether surprised when, a week or so later, this ‘Scottie’ saunters into the busy canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District and turns out to be none other than Trimmer. He is momentarily taken aback, but nothing daunts Virginia and she says hello. She is obviously going to keep silent about their four days of passion in a Glasgow hotel in November, but that’s no reason not to be civil.

Trimmer is back in the frame because he is called in by General Whale and told he is to carry out a little operation, which will involve a journey by submarine. He is to take his squad and report to Portsmouth. Ian Kilbannock will be, as we’ve seen, accompanying him. Trimmer is taken as the epitome of a bad officer since he has mislaid his ‘section’, never calls them together, never inspects them, is only really semi-attached to the army at all.

In yet another coincidence, Kilbannock says he’ll need to prepare a bit of a profile for the press about Trimmer and asks him to pop into his place for a drink before going onto Portsmouth and, of course, when Trimmer thus pops in, it is to discover Kerstie and Virginia. There is a passage of social comedy, not least the way Ian Kilbannock realises from Trimmer, Kerstie and Virginia’s conversation that something is going on but can’t work out what.

Back in Egypt the small incident of the priest Guy thought was asking too many questions comes back to haunt him. Tommy calls him in to say the priest has definitely been identified as a spy and he has been reported talking to him. Guy says yes, he thought he was a spy, and he reported it to Major Hound. Major Hound who had, until that moment been quietly gloating in a corner of the room is now put on the spot and has to admit to Tommy that, yes, Guy did mention something about it. Tommy tells Hound to write a formal letter to HQ exonerating Guy. Eventually a copy of this letter finds its way to Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole who adds it to his ever-expanding file on Guy Crouchback.

Operation Popgun

Trimmer and his little squad of eight men is kept hanging around at Portsmouth for weeks. Finally they are sent aboard a submarine, along with Ian Kilbannock and a lot of explosives. His description of a journey by submarine is interesting. Basically, boring with no sense of movement. After quite a few hours they surface at night but can’t find the island which is the objective. It is very foggy. An atmosphere of farcical amateurishness. Ian has had quite a few whiskeys to fortify himself i.e. is tipsy during this military operation.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’

They are fired on from her window by an old lady with a shotgun who swears at them in French. Turns out they are not on a little Channel island at all but have landed on mainland France. They run and tumble down a slope into a railway cutting. A slow train passes as they hide. It takes them 25 minutes to make it back to the beach. Trimmer is revealed as a catastrophically bad officer, with no idea what to do, lets the soldiers smoke once they’re ashore, runs away at the first shot etc. What Jumbo Trotter would call a ‘wrong ‘un’.

In his absence his sergeant led the men a little way inland and blew up the railway line then calmly returned to the beach where Trimmer was waiting impatiently, and embarked in the dinghies back to the submarine. The submarine signals ahead that the mission was a great success, and on arriving in Portsmouth McTavish / Trimmer and his men are hailed as heroes by Major Albright, GSO II (Planning), HOO HQ, and the General tells Ian to a) write it up and b) write citations for medals for the sergeant and Trimmer. Farce. Absurdity.

This is then wonderfully embellished by Kilbannock in the press release he gives to the papers (shades of Scoop and its satire on the fabulous lies routinely told by newspapers, shades crystallised when one of the characters mentions the Daily Beast and its proprietor Lord Copper). Then, in a sweet piece of plotting, is read by none other than Mr Crouchback in distant Matchet, who tells his friend Mrs Tickeridge what a fine fellow this Captain McTavish must be. Then it is relayed to the commando in Egypt where the colonel who suggested McTavish be included swanks himself on his ability to spot men and ridicules Guy’s scepticism about Trimmer’s abilities.

In fact the Trimmer affair becomes a stick to beat all Waugh’s enemies with. Head of the commando emphasises that news of the operation must be passed to the Spanish veterans who’ve been assigned to the unit. And the Labour members in the House of Commons get wind of the fact that Trimmer was rejected from the Halberdiers because of his working class background as a hairdresser i.e. snobbery and the old school tie.

He becomes so popular that a very senior meeting is convened to find him an appropriate post and General Whale is appalled to find himself being ordered to give him a senior command, maybe of an entire commando battalion. Ian Kilbannock helps his boss out with a wizard wheeze: Trimmer has a certain confident breezy style: how about sending him to America to promote Anglo-American friendship.

In Waugh’s hands the war is a kind of Engine of Absurdity; it takes ordinary peacetime absurdity and cranks it up to completely new levels.

The fall of Crete

Out in the real world Greece quickly falls to a well planned and executed German invasion 6 to 30 April 1941. 7,000 British and Australian troops are captured. There’s a panic-stricken evacuation of the rest. Guy’s commando is put in charge of defending Alexandria as the war in North Africa turns in the Germans’ favour.

Quite suddenly X commando are told they are to be embarked and sail to the relief of Crete which the Germans, following the total capture of Greece, are now attacking. The complicated business of embarking the entire commando and setting sail, but next morning Guy wakes to find they’re sailing back to Egypt, the ship’s engines have become faulty. Tommy and Guy go for a splendid meal.

Next morning, rather hungover, they embark on a new ship and steam in a heavy swell to the waters round Crete. Here Colonel Tommy slips off a ladder and breaks his leg. Guy finds a haggard senior officer, a Lieutenant-Commander from Crete, in conversation with the captain, saying it’s all a shambles. A motor launch comes alongside their ship, they think it’s for them to embark in but in fact it’s full of walking wounded who painfully come aboard, overfilling the ship. Its skipper says he has another run to make then has orders to scuttle the launch. He tells Guy it’s all over: Crete has fallen.

Nonetheless X commando’s orders are to embark so they climb down and in and are ferried to the wrecked quay which is packed with wounded men clamouring to get on the boat and away. Hound and Guy shout for any representatives of B commando and a battered weary man replies who tells them its commanding officer Prentice is dead, killed during an attack on an airfield. It is 26 May 1941.

The disintegration of Major Hound

In Tommy Blackhouse’s absence Major Hound is in charge of X commando and the core of this long complex account of the collapse and evacuation of Crete is a painful description of the mental and moral collapse of Major Hound. Very early on he tries to cultivate a friendship with Guy by asking if he can address him by his first name (fine) and telling guy his own nickname is Fido. From that first misplaced confidence, it is steadily downhill (p.175).

Under the stress of the chaos and confusion, and huge columns of men marching to the sea, and the constant attacks of Stuka dive bombers, the lack of sleep and, very quickly, the hunger and the thirst, all Major Hound’s book training goes out of the window, he makes foolish decisions, he makes wild decisions, stabbing randomly at a map to indicate where they’ll set up their HQ, then hunger drives him to muck in with the ordinary soldiers and lose all authority.

And then he abandons his post, abandons his men, and begins a wild hallucinatory march to the sea and escape. At one point he slips off a path and falls through the branches of a tree into a deep gully, and I expected him to die. He is thoroughly looted by a huge Cretan peasant and then, to my surprise, is discovered by Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Ludovic has already impressed everyone he meets as an odd fish, a sense confirmed by the philosophical journal he keeps and which Waugh quotes for the reader. When Major Hound insists on driving his men in a lorry up to a location he has almost arbitrarily chosen will be the commando’s HQ, Ludovic begins to display his skills at scrounging and at talking to the common soldiers in their own ‘plebeian’ tongue, or to Australian or New Zealand troops, as easily as talking posh to the officers.

Anyway, Ludovic discovers Major Hound lying bruised in this valley and helps him back to what turns out to be a very cosy cave Ludovic and half the rest of the Major’s troop have assembled up the hill. Seeing which way the land lay, they set about looting and scrounging within a day of arriving and have built up an impressive supply of food. His ulterior motivation emerges when Ludovic frankly tells him that they’ve tried to get aboard one of the launches evacuating men, but there are thousands waiting on the quays and the guards are only letting through troops of men accompanied by an officer. Aha.

Guy among the Halberdiers on Crete

Meanwhile Guy very much does not go to pieces. After Major Hound disappears, Guy makes his own way back towards the sea in the three-ton lorry they’d set out in, having a series of chaotic encounters,  for example picking up a venerable old Greek general and giving him and his ADC a lift, running into a German motor cyclist, both sides eyeballing each for a moment before turning round and retreating. He stumbles into an abandoned Greek village and finds two brown-eyed girls guarding the body of a dead soldier. Guy notices he is a Catholic and say a prayer over his body. In some ways he likes travelling alone and travelling light.

But eventually he finds himself at the headquarters of his old regiment, the Halberdiers. Just to be clear, Guy was a proud member of the Halberdiers until he blotted his copybook at the end of Men at Arms, and was then seconded to the commandos, X commando in particular, the one led by Tommy Blackhouse up in the Isle of Mugg. The overall title given the commandos is ‘Hookforce’, even after it becomes known that Ritchie-Hooke has gone missing presumed dead in Africa.

So Guy is delighted to be suddenly among friends again when he discovers the Halberdiers HQ at a place called Babali Hani, men like Colonel Tickeridge and number of the men, including some from his own D company. But when he asks to take part in a forward movement against the enemy he is turned down. He is not part of the regiment any more and the middle of a battle is no place to start swapping units. And he feels the familiar Guy Crouchback of being an outsider, an alien, with no family, that has dogged him all his life:

A few hours earlier he had exulted in his loneliness. Now the case was altered. He was a ‘guest from the higher formation’, a ‘Hookforce body’, without place or function, a spectator. And all the deep sense of desolation which he had sought to cure, which from time to time momentarily seemed to be cured, overwhelmed him as of old. His heart sank. It seemed to him as though literally an organ of his body were displaced, subsiding, falling heavily like a feather in a vacuum jar; Philoctetes set apart from his fellows by an old festering wound; Philoctetes without his bow. (p.210)

At least Tickeridge allows him to accompany him in a visit to the front line, Halberdier units spread across a shallow valley, coming under mortar fire from the Germans opposite. Guy observes the Halberdiers withdraw their line a little. The plan is for the Halberdiers to withdraw through Hookforce who will provide a last line of defence. Guy returns to his own troop to begin to organise them. The absence of Major Hound is not mentioned as he briefs reliable Sergeant Smiley.

Trimmer the PR phenomenon

Cut to London. Ian Kilbannock is touting Trimmer the war hero round the press, and has a date to meet three hard-bitten American journalists at the Savoy. Trimmer has become infatuated with Virginia who says he disgusts her. This is the opportunity for some pretty crude satire of American journalists, who Waugh has named Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan and who Ian is trying to persuade that Trimmer is the heroic face of a new classless Britain. The ramshackle journalists get drunk and sentimental, a crude caricature of belligerent, ignorant Yanks.

But Trimmer is genuinely haunted by his four days of love with Virginia in Glasgow. He can’t concentrate and Ian is worried because Trimmer is about the only good news propaganda coup he and his department have had all year. All this he explains to Virginia when he gets back to his HOO HQ office in Marchmain House for he has got her a job working as his secretary. She did it precisely to get away from the bloody canteen and avoid Trimmer, but now Ian tells her she has to do her patriotic duty and see him, cheer him up, gee him up to perform better in his visits to munitions factories and so on. the war effort depends on it!

Guy at Sphakia

It is 31 May 1941. Guy has kept in touch with moving HQ and followed orders to march his men down to this hill overlooking the sea. Their task is to hold up the enemy while the last stragglers leave the beach and then surrender.

He has a last chat with Ivor Claire, both speculating what it will be like in a prisoner of war camp, then he falls exhausted, like everyone else, shattered.

Dawn finds Guy in the wrecked harbour with thousands of other abandoned and exhausted soldiers, foraging for food and water, smashing their weapons and any other smashable equipment so the Germans don’t get it, the enormous litter of war.

After gazing at the twinkling Med for a while he decides on a whim to go for a swim, luxuriating in the clear water of a cove round the corner from the filthy harbour, floating on his back looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Beautiful evocative description. Eventually he swims over to a spur of rock sheltering the cove and is just pulling himself out onto a rocky shelf when to his amazement a hand is stretched out to help him and it is…Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Up and out he gets and they talk. The subject of Major Hound is raised and discussed in a sentence, the reader getting the strong impression Ludovic used him to get to the beach and then… dumped him…or murdered him? Guy asks him what the devil he’s doing here and Ludovic, in that unnerving way of his, replies that he was contemplating suicide, diving into the sea and swimming south till he drowns. He asks Tony whether that would count as suicide, theologically speaking.

Tony doesn’t know and moves the conversation onto swapping survival stories, then Guy fills him in on the final orders i.e. surrender to the Germans. They both sit surveying the scene of hundreds of men engaged in various pointless activities, including some soldiers fixing a local fishing boat. After a while he notices they’ve manhandled it down the beach and into the sea and are fiddling with the engine. It kicks into life with a puff of black smoke. The little sapper who’s been leading the team and shouts at the beach that they’re taking the boat to freedom, anyone want to come?

Guy consults his men who all prefer to take their chances on dry land then wades out and hauls himself over the side of the boat. Only then does he realise Ludovic has followed him having heard something, but both men are drowned out by the enormous racket of the diesel outboard motor. They start to chug away from the beach and then Guy sees what suddenly motivated Ludovic. Out of the sky appears a wing of Stukas which proceed to systematically dive bomb the beach and harbour, massacring the men waiting there, mangled bits of body thrown into the air. One Stuka makes a strafe over the little boat but then returns to the richer picking onshore. And so, having narrowly escaped annihilation, the little local fishing boat puts out of the picture, one of the last survivors of the ghastly fiasco and failure which was the defence of Crete.

Hospital in Alexandria

Part two chapter seven opens with an absolutely brilliant description of Guy coming round in the hospital in Egypt, of the world of silence and great distance which he inhabits as he recovers from shock and exposure.

Confused memories drift through his mind – he refuses to talk. Then one day Mrs Stitch breezes into his room, repeating the famous quote from the incident on the Italian island and without thinking Guy replies. It is one of the most wonderful moments in a wonderful book – now he can talk again he pops down the hall to see Tommy Blackhouse who’s still laid up with his broken leg. Tony tells him he was carried ashore by Ludovic when their ship finally reached shore in Egypt. Of the four or five other chaps on the boat there was no sign. In the third book in the trilogy it is darkly hinted that Ludovic did away with them, though we never find out for sure.

The Ivor Claire affair

Tommy and Guy discuss the case of Ivor. There is a great scandal because Ivor’s troop were unambiguously ordered to wait till the last minute and then surrender to the Germans. Mrs Stitch tells Guy that Ivor made his way to the beach for last orders and there found a launch leaving whose captain ordered him to get aboard and be saved, claiming another launch was on its way to collect his men. Of course the second launch never arrived and so Ivor stands accused of disobeying a direct order and abandoning his men.

Guy is appalled and disillusioned. He considered Ivor a flower of English gentlemanliness, but turns out to be a sneak and cad. To be honest, I spent the last pages confused because I couldn’t see the difference between Guy who left his men on the beach (to be bombed to death) and made it back to Alex, and Ivor who left his men in the hills and made it back to Alex. What would Ivor letting himself be captured have done for the war effort? This is the common sense view taken by Mrs Stitch who appears to have been involved in spiriting Ivor away to distant India on some secondment, where he can sit out the war among people who know nothing of the story and don’t care.

Staying with Mrs Stitch

Mrs Stitch insists Guy comes and stays with her at the swish villa assigned to her or, more accurately, her very well connected husband Algernon (Algie). It is a comic conceit that Julia has inherited from her strict Victorian grandparents a belief that bachelors should not be pampered and so awards him a squalid concrete bunker of a room, down at basement level, liberally populated by cockroaches.

But he gets to lie on their chaise longue, be waited on hand and foot and to attend some truly swanky parties. One day Julia returns from town with the staggering news that Germany has invaded Russia, 22 June 1941 (p.239).

Mrs Stitch asks Guy if there’s anyone he’s like to see and he says old Major Tickeredge – so he comes to lunch and is awed by the VIPs around him, but after lunch stuns Guy by saying Ben Ritchie-Hook is alive after all!

With the wiping out of X commando Guy is looking forward to being returned to the Halberdiers so is very upset to receive a letter delivered by motorcycle courier ordering him to join a ship the following morning which is to take him back to Blighty. He drives into town to see the officer who signed the order, who tells him it comes from the very top. He begs Mrs Stitch to fix it but she can’t. Very upset. There is a whiff of implication that Mrs Stitch in fact arranged it in order to get Guy completely out of circulation while she spirited her favourite, Ivor Claire, off to safe obscurity out in India.

Epilogue

It takes eight long weeks sailing in a rusty old hulk, Canary Castle, right round Africa with a long stopover in Durban to be refitted. But eventually Guy arrives back in England, back in London and back in his club, Bellamy’s.

This brief epilogue opens with no narratorial introduction, just dialogue. We have got to know the so well we can identify the speakers. It recalls the liberal use of the same technique in Vile Bodies, the early 1930s novel this shares a surprising amount with.

And of course there is a simpler pattern going on here, which is that Bellamy’s is where the novel opens and where it closes. Symmetry.

Thus the epilogue opens with Guy being accosted by the usual suspects, not least the humorous press man Ian Kilbannock and his earnest MP brother-in-law, Box-Bender. The former wants to know more about the Ivor Claire affair, then informs him Virginia is doing her patriotic duty and accompanying Trimmer on a tour of munitions factories in Scunthorpe, Hull, Huddersfield, Halifax…

Box-Bender informs Guy that his nephew Tony has written from his German prisoner of war camp asking for works of religious devotion, which troubles him. Why should it? asks Guy.

All the conversation is about help for Russia, Tanks for Russia Week, his allying with Russia has, at least, motivated the working classes to work harder in those factories. And bloody good thing, too!

Guy never wanted to come back, he wanted to join the Halberdiers in the Middle East but when he reports at Halberdiers barracks the C-in-C tells him it was the doctors at Alexandria’s hospital who reported that Guy needed a complete change of scene. (Or is that all part of Mrs Stitch’s ruse?)

And so the novel ends with Guy back where he began, practising drill on the barracks parade ground, waiting to find his place in the big world around him. Except that things are now no longer so clear and (childishly) simple as they were two years earlier. The performance of British services have been lamentable, the man he considered ‘the flower of English chivalry’ Ivor Claire, turns out to let the side down; but overarching everything, the alliance with barbaric Bolshevik Russia hugely compromises the claim of the war to be any kind of moral crusade. And so the novel ends with Guy back at square one, looking for a role and repossessed by his characteristic gloom and pessimism:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.

Themes and images

Public school

As pointed out so many times, when Waugh (or his characters) reach for a comparison, almost always the first ones that come to mind are taken from their experiences at prep school or private school. Thus, for Guy, in the middle of an air raid:

Guy was momentarily reminded of Holy Saturday at Downside; early gusty March mornings of boyhood; the doors wide open in the unfinished butt of the Abbey; half the school coughing; fluttering linen; the glowing brazier and the priest with his hyssop, paradoxically blessing fire with water.

Snobbery

Waugh’s belief in a class system can be deduced from comments he makes about being an officer in the army:

In all his military service Guy never ceased to marvel at the effortless transitions of intercourse between equality and superiority. It was a figure which no temporary officer ever learned to cut. Some of them were better than the regulars with their men. None ever achieved the art of displaying authority over junior officers without self-consciousness and consequent offence. Regular soldiers were survivals of a happy civilization where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.

‘Where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.’ That is his ideal world, a medieval world of precise rankings, accompanied, ideally, by sumptuary laws.

The working classes rarely appear in his narratives except as servants, waiters, valets, drivers, cooks and so on. They rarely if ever speak, they are nameless serfs at the beck and call of the only people who have agency, Waugh and his class.

If they do speak it is either to reveal they are solid chaps – like some of the brave soldiers Guy meets in Crete whose dialogue is entirely restricted to either ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ – or it is to reveal their coarse, petty money-mindedness, as is the case with the scheming Cuthberts who try and evict nice old Mr Crouchback from their hotel, and are indicted either by their dropped h’s and plebeian idioms or, more subtly, by their complete failure to understand the superior moral standards of their lords and masters:

‘He’s a deep one and no mistake. I never have understood him, not properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine.’

Amateurism

I appreciate from everything I’ve ever read about them that lots of plans and arrangements in times of war are shambolic, but Waugh goes out of his way to emphasise the shambolic nature of pretty much everything his hero encounters, from office politics and rivalries, the loss and misplacement of paperwork, errors over train or shipping times and so on.

These litanies of relatively minor incompetence are then reflected in actual military operations – on a small scale by Operation Popgun, on a massive scale in the fiasco of Crete (which itself followed the fiasco of Norway [described in Put Out More Flags] and the fiasco of Dakar [described in Men at Arms]).

The breezy incompetence displayed by almost every aspect of the military is connected to the cult of upper-class nonchalance, of displaying your upper class credentials by refusing to be seen to be trying too hard, and refusing be fazed or perturbed by anything.

This is exemplified by the elephantine imperturbability of old Jumbo Trotter or, in a different way, by the administrative officer of HOO HQ who gets used to hearing the most preposterous stories. ‘My entire platoon has just been ambushed and massacred.’ ‘Oh, I say, bad show, old boy.’

Drunkenness

At luncheon Mr Crouchback drank a pint of burgundy.

Everyone gets drunk. ‘Have a drink?’ remains the watchword among these people, as it had been in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. ‘Tight’ is the word they use for ‘drunk’. The narrative describes what this or that individual is like ‘when they’re tight’ because it is just taken for granted that everyone will gets tight at some point or another, sometimes every night.

These posh characters’ haunt is their London club, where they drink prodigious amounts of booze, indeed the novel opens with the image of fine wine and brandy flowing in the gutters of Blitzed London. Evening drinks and evening dinner are always accompanied by plentiful booze. On Mugg they get drunk and in Cape Town they get drunk and in Alexandria they get drunk.

They ate lobster pilaff and a great dish of quail cooked with Muscat grapes…They ate six birds each and drank a bottle of champagne. Then they had green artichokes and another bottle. (p.163)

The character who dominates the first book, Apthorpe, literally drinks himself to death (and is thus a spiritual cousin of pretty boy Sebastian Flyte who drinks himself into impoverished middle age in Brideshead Revited).

And Waugh venerates this drunkenness, finds it admirable, stylish, amusing. I was really struck by the ending of the short South Africa interlude, where we have witnessed Eddie and Bertie getting drunk all day long before going off to a club to drink some more, while Guy admires Ivor Claire do a kind of sub-Noel Coward impersonation of nonchalance and airy superiority. Guy delivers quite a pompous reflection on these three fellow officers:

Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to write. Hitler had accurately counted on the decadence of the class which ran the British Empire, which had appeased him throughout the mid-1930s and which, for a year or so after the declaration of war, continued to seek some kind of accommodation with him, led in the cabinet by Lord Halifax. Hitler, of course, had many sympathisers among the British upper classes, even among Waugh’s own friends, even the abdicated king.

The thought that two drunks and a camp horserider represented the spirit which defeated Hitler is absurd. The brute fact of the English Channel and the heroic efforts of the RAF during the Battle of Britain stymied Hitler’s ambitions but didn’t defeat him, just led to a stalemate. Where Hitler did badly miscalculate was in thinking Soviet Russia would collapse like a pack of cards in the autumn of 1941 and then thinking he could take on Russia and America after Pearl Harbour (December 1941). Set against the enormity of these vast mistakes, the antics of Guy and his drunken shambolic friends seem risible, almost shameful.

‘What say we all have a drink?’ said Bum. (p.215)

(Then again, I suppose you could argue this pompous passage reflects badly on Guy not his author; that it has an artistic purpose which is to set Guy’s childish patriotism up for the fall it receives when Ivor Claire betrays his high calling and lets the side down. Maybe it’s there to set up this further step in Guy’s slow disillusionment with the war and the values it’s supposedly being fought for.)

Childishness

Arguably the amateurishness and the drunkenness are related to the prep school obsession in that they are all childish. These people live in a state of permanently retarded development. The most praised characters, Mr Crouchback and Jumbo Trotter are, in effect, schoolboys protected by their prep schoolboy innocence. The comedy of a character like Mrs Stitch is that she’s a childish cartoon.  Ditto the comic figure who dominates the first book, Apthorpe. Occasionally he writes phrases which bring the implicit childishness of the entire worldview into the open:

Guy set his intelligence section to make a map of the camp, for Major Hound had returned from one of his trips to Cairo with a case labelled ‘intelligence stores’ which proved to contain a kindergarten outfit of coloured inks and drawing materials.

Mental illness

The exception which proves the rule to the dominating sense of childishness is Waugh’s odd fictional relationship with mental illness and states of extremity. They tend to come at the end of the books as a climax to the narrative, hence the description of Tony Last’s delirium then despair at the end of A Handful of Dust.

And so the final passages of this brilliant novel include a) a prolonged passage describing the moral and mental collapse of Major Hound and b) the wonderful, luminous description of Guy’s detached mental state and mutism in the hospital in Alexandria, as he recovers from the terrible effects of prolonged exposure at sea, but for a long time is incapable of responding to anyone, even friends, doctors, nurses.

But there is a wide array of odd mental states throughout the book: for example, the laird of Mugg with his potty obsession with explosives; the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael with her outrageous support of the Nazis; remember that Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, went mad and starved himself to death. Guy himself suffers from recurrent feelings of emptiness and depression. Waugh’s books are weirder and deeper than you first realise.

Credit

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1955. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 5, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 5, 2022

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