Sword of Honor

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Under the title Sword of Honor , the English author Evelyn Waugh summarized the trilogy of his novels Men At Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) in a book.

The work was filmed twice.

content

A detailed overview of the content can be found in the articles on the three individual issues.

The story tells the story of Guy Crouchback, the son of an English noble Catholic family, during World War II .

Crouchback lives in seclusion in the family's Italian country house. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the outbreak of war in 1939, he sees it as his duty to fight the forces of evil for his country. As a militarily inexperienced man in his mid-thirties, it is difficult for him to achieve a position in the British Army that meets his heroic demands. Instead, he experiences the absurdities of the military bureaucracy.

He makes his first combat mission in the battle of Dakar , where a daring brigadier general orders a landing that ends catastrophically; even if a threatened court martial fizzles out, Guy realizes that he is not facing a great military career.

Instead, he is transferred to a special unit (a Commando that corresponds to the Special Air Service ) that is doing landing exercises on a remote island in the Hebrides. In 1941 the unit was relocated to Egypt, where it waited to see whether it would be deployed against Rommel's advancing Africa Corps or fight in the Battle of Crete . The decision is made for Crete, but the battle is already lost for the British by the time Guy arrives. All he and his unit can do is cover the chaotic British retreat. As the rearguard, his unit was supposed to surrender to the Germans, but Guy and a few comrades manage the crossing to Egypt on their own in a small boat.

With the attack of the Germans on the Soviet Union , Joseph Stalin switches to the side of the Allies . That shakes Guy's belief in the meaningfulness of the war badly, for him Stalin and Hitler are equally to be rejected. Little by little (encouraged by his late father) he says goodbye to the claim to make a noticeable contribution to the success of the war and instead seeks to do good on a small scale.

From 1941 to 1943 he worked as a trainer in his home regiment. After parachute training and an injury-related convalescence (during which he got closer to his socially downed ex-wife), he came to Yugoslavia in 1944 as a liaison officer . The unscrupulous power orientation of the communist partisans and the willingness of the western powers to be of service to them further disillusioned him.

background

Waugh also processed his own experiences in World War II in all three war novels in the series. Like his hero Guy, he was Catholic, from the upper class, unmilitary in habit. The military stations in Dakar, Crete and Yugoslavia correspond to Waugh's own missions. The trilogy is unique in English literature in depicting the overall experience of World War II.

Waugh also gave many of his characters traits of real people, some of which he caricatured in vicious ways. The very name of the main character Guy Crouchback indicates the extreme incongruence of his ideals, which stem from a Christian-aristocratic family tradition: a leader who withdraws and becomes a helpless observer. In the last part of the trilogy, specialists work on ridiculous and absurd projects for lack of meaningful tasks. Troop units are also portrayed as curious, such as the Halberdier traditional regiment with its bizarre customs or the X-Commando . Buildings and dwellings also have strange features. Only Guy's father, who represents the principles of a religiously anchored morality, represents a counterpoint to this brutal and at the same time ridiculous world.

A detailed list of the key characters can be found in the articles on the three individual novels.

reception

Penelope Lively referred to the Sword of Honor novels in an article for The Atlantic as Waugh's masterpiece , also compared to the much better known reunion with Brideshead .

expenditure

Film adaptations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kurt Schlueter: Evely Waugh. In: Horst W. Drescher (ed.): English literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, p. 39 ff.
  2. ^ Lively, 2001

Web links

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  • Penelope Lively, A Maverick Historian , in: The Atlantic February 2001, online