I'm not sure why I decided to reread this trilogy by Waugh but I'm glad I did. The overwhelming impression I got from it was that the British military during World War II was as bureaucratic and sluggish as our own. Waugh is an excellent writer and the latest of the three novels was written around 1960 about events that took place twenty years earlier, but the novels are still relevant to life today. ( )

I bought this volume in 1991 to read on holiday in Crete, but then didn't need to. Judged by the bookmarks I found in it, I have twice tried to read it since then, but never got to the end. It became a Covid-19 lockdown project, so I have finally got through it. I am surprised people rate this trilogy so highly, as I found it an unremitting struggle, the humour laboured, the characters unengaging (it was a relief as they were killed off), the events incomprehensible (although that may be the point). It may be a work of its time.

A surprise and a delight. The book covers the years of World War II, with Anglo-Catholic Guy Crouchback at its centre. His assorted experiences (based in part on the author's own) make up the story, and they are richly comic in tone. The last third of the trilogy, in some ways, reads a bit like Catch-22 (which I think is a good thing). It's a very engrossing read, and I highly recommend it. ( )

Fine writing, heavily melancholic and in places absurd but with a strong core of decency. Guy Crouchback, a good man doing his best to do his duty in the Second World War, but buffeted by the random currents and incompetence of military bureaucracy ( )

My second (old) Waugh – and it’s also about the Second World War (did you see what I did there?). I’d been hoping to sneak this onto my Goodreads challenge as three books, as Sword of Honour is an omnibus of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. Except it isn’t, as Waugh rewrote the trilogy as a single novel shortly before his death. So it goes down on the challenge as a single book. Anyway… The novel charts the war experience of Guy Crouchback, scion of an old Catholic aristocratic family now fallen on hard times. He has spent the between-war years in Italy and speaks the language fluently. But he’s a bit of a wet, and the British are so thoroughly incompetent they’re incapable of taking advantage of his language skills. The nearest he gets is serving in Croatia near the end of the war. In fact, if there’s one thing that comes across in Sword of Honour it’s how useless the British were. We like to pretend we won WWII, but we didn’t. Not really. The Soviets did. And the Americans. Initially, we just fucked up big time. That’s what Dunkirk was. A major fuck-up. And even after all that, we still had a country run by upper-class twits and it took a while for the competent middle-class to get control. Reading Sword of Honour makes Brexit seem a lot more understandable – or rather, the fucking hash our government has made of Brexit. And yet Sword of Honour was meant to be a satire. It’s based partly on Waugh’s own war experiences, although he makes a Crouchback a much more likeable protagonist than Waugh himself apparently was. Because was by all accounts he was a nasty piece of work – a total snob and arrogant and a good candidate for being shot by his own men. Waugh gives Crouchback a better, if more ironic, future in his rewrite of the trilogy, but it’s still an essentially cheerful novel for all that it takes the piss mercilessly out of the British armed forces during wartime. I thought it a great deal better than Vile Bodies, not just because its subject matter I found more interesting but because it didn’t feel so overdone. Recommended. ( )