Lieutenant Crouchback, Second Battalion Royal Halberdiers Brigade has returned from service in Dakar under orders to report to Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters in London for special duties and is temporarily attached for training purposes to X Commando, Isle of Mugg. He is to report to Colonel Blackhouse. " 'Tommy Blackhouse?' 'Friend of yours?' 'Yes. He married my wife.' ...' Glad he's a friend of yours.' Guy saluted, turned about and departed only very slightly disconcerted. This was the classic pattern of army life as he had learned it, the vacuum, the spasm, the precipitation, and with it all the peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality."
Officers and Gentlemen is not as humorous as Men At Arms. It is closer to the truth.

Officers and Gentlemen is the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy, drawn from his experiences as a junior officer in World War Two. In addition to the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, there are other characters carried over from the first volume, such as his ex-wife Virginia, his friend (and the second of Virginia’s series of husbands), Tommy Blackhouse, and a strange character named Trimmer, whose manifest incompetence results in ever-higher promotions.
In this book, Guy is detached from the Halberdiers and assigned to Hookforce, a regiment of commandos named after their ostensible commander, Ben Ritchie Hooke, another carryover from the first volume. However, he is mostly absent from the plot of this book.
In the first half of this novel, Guy and the rest of the commandos are on the windswept Hebridean Isle of Mugg for training, a shambolic affair that leaves them ill-prepared for what they face when finally thrown into action, in the second half of the book, as last-minute reinforcements on Crete. Their assignment, as last arrivals, is to cover the retreat of the rest of the Allied forces, remain behind, and surrender to the Germans, a fate Guy escapes in a humiliating way.
The satirical portrayal of incompetence established in the first book, Men at Arms, continues here, but the mood, especially in the second part, is darker. Meanwhile, unrelated incidents in Guy’s inglorious military career are being noted (unbeknownst to Guy) by a paranoid counterintelligence officer at a desk in London who concludes that these form a pattern. This is sure to play a role in the final volume, Unconditional Surrender, which I look forward to reading. ( )

No. This is an account, heavy on dialogue with much specialized chit-chat among WW2 British officers, of their being sent from England to support the Allies on Crete, which was being evacuated by the Allies even as these officers arrived in the theater. There is precious little in the way of combat, and that little borders on absurdity (which is all fair enough as broadly representative of so much of war for so many). The dialogue is so littered with military lingo and abbreviations and banalities as surely to be of interest only to Brits who went through a similar experience about the same time. Or maybe to someone who has no idea whatever of the military and hungers for a sense of it; but there are much better sources. You have been warned.
Try Brideshead Revisited instead, five stars. ( )

Een ironisch verhaal over gentlemen officers voor wie de oorlog (WO II) vaak niet meer dan een vervelende bijkomstigheid is. Ze willen hun luxe leventje kunnen voortzetten. Er wordt een bijzondere eenheid gevormd uit soldaten die om diverse redenen niet meer bij hun eigen onderdeel zijn, en die krijgen een training op het eiland Mugg in Schotland. Daar hebben ze te maken met de Laird of Mugg, die alleen geïnteresseerd is in dynamiet om z'n eiland naar eigen idee te veranderen. Uiteindelijk moet de eenheid naar Kreta, waar zwaar gevochten wordt. Ze worden aan land gezet als er al geen redden meer aan is. Overleven is het belangrijkste, en zo volgen er een paar niet altijd even eervolle vluchtpogingen. Zal de oorlogvoering veranderen als "gewone burgers" het commando overnemen?

488. Officers and Gentlemen, by Evelyn Waugh (read 29 Dec 1955) I did not comment on this book while reading it, and now of course it is superseded by the final version, which I read in November 1983. ( )