Yesterday I had an unexpected treat. There are 15 films in the wonderful Daily Mail War Movie Collection with several, the most outstanding films of the post second World War period. There was one which I thought I had not seen before as I failed to immediately recognise the title, The Sword of Honour.
As soon as it opened I realised this was the outstanding BBC shown dramatization of the three novels by Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms 1952, Officers and Gentleman 1955 and Unconditional Surrender 1961 (The end of the Battle in the USA) and which was based on his actual experience, however loosely. Given that I continue to regard the 13 part television series of his work Brideshead Revisited as the greatest TV production of its kind ever made, I am surprised with myself for not having acquired any of his other works, especially as early on I became a fan of C P Snow and Anthony Powell and have the majority of their novels. I would like to remedy this situation but suspect time has run out.
The three novels are said to have been fully covered in this 2001 adaptation which lasts over three hours and I have no recollection if I saw the 1967 version with Edward Woodward, although it was the kind of programme I would not have missed. Waugh’s style is to portray the reality of the middle and upper classes with a humorous wit but he is also a very serious writer as I discussed after noting my experience of Brideshead on acquiring the series on DVD.
The idealistic hero of the three works is Guy Crouchbank, upper class with his father with whom he has a good relationship, struggling to maintain the family home and estate. They are both strong practicing Catholics although Waugh himself was a convert, a non unusual occurrence for middle and upper class Englishmen and women who find the reality of life very different from the idealism of their youth. Waugh maintained his respect for English culture and traditions, possessed a strong masculine approach to social order and government and hated what happened after the second World War and would have probably become a revolutionary and he lived to experience something of the changes from 1960’s. He died in 1966 at the age of 62. He was therefore in his mid thirties when the Second World commenced and the first book chronicles his experience of getting a commission and his first expedition adventure to North Africa. The book also coves the failure of his first marriage to someone who needed the excitement of new relationships.
The character in the book is Guy Crouchbank whose wife has married again someone part of the social circle of public school, Oxbridge University, London scene and country house parties, the Gentleman’s club in Pall Mall and the army. In real life because Waugh converted to Catholicism after his marriage he was able to gain an annulment and he remained married to his second wife for the rest of his life with seven children, and with one son Aubron also becoming an internationally known journalist and writer. It is noteworthy that Evelyn’s second wife was a cousin of his first.
In the book he attempts to seduce his divorced wife when he returns for a decade in Italy but she rejects him and then has an affair, one of several, with a charlatan hero who fathers her child. Pregnant, she turns to Guy who inherited his father’s (played by Leslie Phillips) wealth and estate and they remarry. When she is killed in a bombing raid the final scene of the film is his return from the war to get to know and bring up his son.
How far Waugh’s experience of the army is portrayed in the books and films I cannot say but almost none of the fellow and senior officers come out well.
There are two official hero’s in the books and film The first is a press office creation during the period when something was desperately needed to raise public moral. Crouchbank has joined the new Commando brigade after coming home in disgrace from the North African mission, and he nominates Trimmer McTavish, a man who has spent his war to date keeping out of danger and chasing the ladies. He takes up with Guy‘s, former wife when he remeets her again when on leave and we learn that he had been her lover when a steward on an Atlantic liner. The press orientated mission is to go with a small group and blow up a tower on a poorly defended island of the French coast. By mistake they are bought off the French coast by the submarine and there is no tower and only enemy is a French peasant woman with a shot gun. The sergeant with the group has the sense to blow up the railway line before they leave and this is represented as having affected important German transport links with McTavish made into a national hero and used to raise funds by promoting the sale of war bonds. When Guy’s wife falls on hard times she is taken in by the press officer and his wife and he forces her to establish an affair with McTavish if she wants to keep her free board and lodgings. When McTavish is sent on a six month raising campaign to the USA and Virginia finds herself pregnant, she openly admits to using Guy to get out of the situation.
While Guy has no illusions about he manufactured hero McTavish he is fully taken in by someone he believes is a true hero Ivor Clair who is young, handsome and full member of the upper classes. It is only in the last third that Guy realises that the man its not as honourable as he seems as he has disobeyed the order to surrender on Crete and escape to Egypt where he is having an affair with the wife of the Commanding officer and also learns that his original gallantry award was obtained under false pretences.
Covering up military mistakes and individual misdeeds is a great theme of the books as well as the incompetence of the hierarchy. I understand that in the first book Guy who just about managed to get a commission in a ill thought of fictitious corps called he Halberdiers spends a great deal of his time getting on and off trains and ships that go nowhere. When training with Halberdiers he encounters one fellow officer who is equipped with a vast expensive kit for every possible climate and terrain and which includes a portable toilet called the thunder box, coveted by the Commanding officer when he sees it and which is blown up in in tussle between the two over ownership. When they are stopped from the first mission from North Africa Guy agrees to lead a raiding party to capture something although against orders. However Guy gets sent home when he smuggles alcohol to a fellow officer who has become sick and is under treatment in sick bay from an alleged tropical disease from his work in Africa. Guy is told that the man died as consequence of this gesture because he suffered from liver disease.
As a consequence of this he is taken from the front line and made responsible for training until able to join the commandos and after training is posted to Egypt and then Crete before the Island is abandoned. Here because the commanding officer has an accident and breaks a leg while in transit, the unit is led by a rule clinging petty Hitler who lacks commonsense and panic freezes in adversity. Played by Robert Daws, Major Hound, nicknamed Fido is murdered by a Sgt who later with Guy survives an open boat which they take to escape from becoming a prisoner of war on Crete and land in North Africa. Later the same Sgt becomes the commanding officer of a parachute training camp to which Guy is sent and who spends his time hiding in his office from Guy. He has been keeping a diary of his adventures which he publishes as a novel when the war is over.
It is in the final book and section of the film that Waugh switches from lampooning to the very serious as Guy is sent as a one man military mission to Croatia prior to the formation of Communist Yugoslavia. The communist partisans are portrayed as dedicated and effective but also ruthless and he risks the wrath of both his hierarchy and the fledgling state by taking the part of 100 Jewish refugees from the camps. He is successful in getting all but a couple free to travel to a transit camp in allied controlled Italy en route to Palestine. The couple includes a cultured English speaking Italian Jewess whose husband becomes essential to the state because he is an electrician and can keep the allied supplied power station generators functioning. Later they are found guilty of treason and executed on the fictitious grounds of having capitalist propaganda, which includes a magazine provide by Guy when he visits to say goodbye. When Guy protests that the allied command took no action to save the couple he is reminded of overall priorities and the bigger picture. It is the justification which has been used by capitalists governments to justify their deals with fascists and communists states and dictatorships ever since democracy was developed in the USA and Britain.
In the first version of the series Guy has children by second wife who are disinherited by Trimmer’s son because he has been registered as Guy’s. In the published edition but not the film he married the daughter of another old Catholic families but they have no children not to complicate the succession. One of the points of the book is a conversation which Guy has with his father before his death in which his father explains that regardless of the pain and suffering, the disappoints and failures of life, the essence of being a Catholic is the saving of souls, and this is the inspiration for his decision to marry his former wife and bring up the child by a man he despises as his own.
Oddly the film does not explain its title, in that in the third book “a splendid ceremonials word is made at the King’s command,” to be presented to the Soviet Union in recognition of the sacrifices that he Soviet people made in the war against the Nazis.. In reality this was a sword commissioned by the King commemorating the battle of Stalingrad, It was put on display in Westminster Abbey and people queues to look at it. It sums up Waugh’s view that Guy is not impressed or with Stalin and is not tempted to join in the party held for the event and give sup the opportunity to enjoy luxury food for lunch on his 40th birthday.
Guy Crouchbank is played by the excellent actor Daniel Craig who has become more internationally known through taking over the role of James Bond. I especially enjoyed his performance in the TV series Our Friends in the North and also the films the Road to Perdition and Munich. His wide range of roles includes Lara Croft Tomb Raider, a Kid at King Arthur’s Court and the Golden Compass.
As soon as it opened I realised this was the outstanding BBC shown dramatization of the three novels by Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms 1952, Officers and Gentleman 1955 and Unconditional Surrender 1961 (The end of the Battle in the USA) and which was based on his actual experience, however loosely. Given that I continue to regard the 13 part television series of his work Brideshead Revisited as the greatest TV production of its kind ever made, I am surprised with myself for not having acquired any of his other works, especially as early on I became a fan of C P Snow and Anthony Powell and have the majority of their novels. I would like to remedy this situation but suspect time has run out.
The three novels are said to have been fully covered in this 2001 adaptation which lasts over three hours and I have no recollection if I saw the 1967 version with Edward Woodward, although it was the kind of programme I would not have missed. Waugh’s style is to portray the reality of the middle and upper classes with a humorous wit but he is also a very serious writer as I discussed after noting my experience of Brideshead on acquiring the series on DVD.
The idealistic hero of the three works is Guy Crouchbank, upper class with his father with whom he has a good relationship, struggling to maintain the family home and estate. They are both strong practicing Catholics although Waugh himself was a convert, a non unusual occurrence for middle and upper class Englishmen and women who find the reality of life very different from the idealism of their youth. Waugh maintained his respect for English culture and traditions, possessed a strong masculine approach to social order and government and hated what happened after the second World War and would have probably become a revolutionary and he lived to experience something of the changes from 1960’s. He died in 1966 at the age of 62. He was therefore in his mid thirties when the Second World commenced and the first book chronicles his experience of getting a commission and his first expedition adventure to North Africa. The book also coves the failure of his first marriage to someone who needed the excitement of new relationships.
The character in the book is Guy Crouchbank whose wife has married again someone part of the social circle of public school, Oxbridge University, London scene and country house parties, the Gentleman’s club in Pall Mall and the army. In real life because Waugh converted to Catholicism after his marriage he was able to gain an annulment and he remained married to his second wife for the rest of his life with seven children, and with one son Aubron also becoming an internationally known journalist and writer. It is noteworthy that Evelyn’s second wife was a cousin of his first.
In the book he attempts to seduce his divorced wife when he returns for a decade in Italy but she rejects him and then has an affair, one of several, with a charlatan hero who fathers her child. Pregnant, she turns to Guy who inherited his father’s (played by Leslie Phillips) wealth and estate and they remarry. When she is killed in a bombing raid the final scene of the film is his return from the war to get to know and bring up his son.
How far Waugh’s experience of the army is portrayed in the books and films I cannot say but almost none of the fellow and senior officers come out well.
There are two official hero’s in the books and film The first is a press office creation during the period when something was desperately needed to raise public moral. Crouchbank has joined the new Commando brigade after coming home in disgrace from the North African mission, and he nominates Trimmer McTavish, a man who has spent his war to date keeping out of danger and chasing the ladies. He takes up with Guy‘s, former wife when he remeets her again when on leave and we learn that he had been her lover when a steward on an Atlantic liner. The press orientated mission is to go with a small group and blow up a tower on a poorly defended island of the French coast. By mistake they are bought off the French coast by the submarine and there is no tower and only enemy is a French peasant woman with a shot gun. The sergeant with the group has the sense to blow up the railway line before they leave and this is represented as having affected important German transport links with McTavish made into a national hero and used to raise funds by promoting the sale of war bonds. When Guy’s wife falls on hard times she is taken in by the press officer and his wife and he forces her to establish an affair with McTavish if she wants to keep her free board and lodgings. When McTavish is sent on a six month raising campaign to the USA and Virginia finds herself pregnant, she openly admits to using Guy to get out of the situation.
While Guy has no illusions about he manufactured hero McTavish he is fully taken in by someone he believes is a true hero Ivor Clair who is young, handsome and full member of the upper classes. It is only in the last third that Guy realises that the man its not as honourable as he seems as he has disobeyed the order to surrender on Crete and escape to Egypt where he is having an affair with the wife of the Commanding officer and also learns that his original gallantry award was obtained under false pretences.
Covering up military mistakes and individual misdeeds is a great theme of the books as well as the incompetence of the hierarchy. I understand that in the first book Guy who just about managed to get a commission in a ill thought of fictitious corps called he Halberdiers spends a great deal of his time getting on and off trains and ships that go nowhere. When training with Halberdiers he encounters one fellow officer who is equipped with a vast expensive kit for every possible climate and terrain and which includes a portable toilet called the thunder box, coveted by the Commanding officer when he sees it and which is blown up in in tussle between the two over ownership. When they are stopped from the first mission from North Africa Guy agrees to lead a raiding party to capture something although against orders. However Guy gets sent home when he smuggles alcohol to a fellow officer who has become sick and is under treatment in sick bay from an alleged tropical disease from his work in Africa. Guy is told that the man died as consequence of this gesture because he suffered from liver disease.
As a consequence of this he is taken from the front line and made responsible for training until able to join the commandos and after training is posted to Egypt and then Crete before the Island is abandoned. Here because the commanding officer has an accident and breaks a leg while in transit, the unit is led by a rule clinging petty Hitler who lacks commonsense and panic freezes in adversity. Played by Robert Daws, Major Hound, nicknamed Fido is murdered by a Sgt who later with Guy survives an open boat which they take to escape from becoming a prisoner of war on Crete and land in North Africa. Later the same Sgt becomes the commanding officer of a parachute training camp to which Guy is sent and who spends his time hiding in his office from Guy. He has been keeping a diary of his adventures which he publishes as a novel when the war is over.
It is in the final book and section of the film that Waugh switches from lampooning to the very serious as Guy is sent as a one man military mission to Croatia prior to the formation of Communist Yugoslavia. The communist partisans are portrayed as dedicated and effective but also ruthless and he risks the wrath of both his hierarchy and the fledgling state by taking the part of 100 Jewish refugees from the camps. He is successful in getting all but a couple free to travel to a transit camp in allied controlled Italy en route to Palestine. The couple includes a cultured English speaking Italian Jewess whose husband becomes essential to the state because he is an electrician and can keep the allied supplied power station generators functioning. Later they are found guilty of treason and executed on the fictitious grounds of having capitalist propaganda, which includes a magazine provide by Guy when he visits to say goodbye. When Guy protests that the allied command took no action to save the couple he is reminded of overall priorities and the bigger picture. It is the justification which has been used by capitalists governments to justify their deals with fascists and communists states and dictatorships ever since democracy was developed in the USA and Britain.
In the first version of the series Guy has children by second wife who are disinherited by Trimmer’s son because he has been registered as Guy’s. In the published edition but not the film he married the daughter of another old Catholic families but they have no children not to complicate the succession. One of the points of the book is a conversation which Guy has with his father before his death in which his father explains that regardless of the pain and suffering, the disappoints and failures of life, the essence of being a Catholic is the saving of souls, and this is the inspiration for his decision to marry his former wife and bring up the child by a man he despises as his own.
Oddly the film does not explain its title, in that in the third book “a splendid ceremonials word is made at the King’s command,” to be presented to the Soviet Union in recognition of the sacrifices that he Soviet people made in the war against the Nazis.. In reality this was a sword commissioned by the King commemorating the battle of Stalingrad, It was put on display in Westminster Abbey and people queues to look at it. It sums up Waugh’s view that Guy is not impressed or with Stalin and is not tempted to join in the party held for the event and give sup the opportunity to enjoy luxury food for lunch on his 40th birthday.
Guy Crouchbank is played by the excellent actor Daniel Craig who has become more internationally known through taking over the role of James Bond. I especially enjoyed his performance in the TV series Our Friends in the North and also the films the Road to Perdition and Munich. His wide range of roles includes Lara Croft Tomb Raider, a Kid at King Arthur’s Court and the Golden Compass.
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