Sword of Honour: Difference between revisions

← Older edit

Sword of Honour (view source)

Revision as of 15:53, 5 October 2020

6 bytes added , 3 years ago

no edit summary

Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators

213,740

edits

Revision as of 18:21, 9 January 2014 (view source) Dai-Guard (talk \| contribs) m (Mass update links) ← Older edit		Latest revision as of 15:53, 5 October 2020 (view source) Robkelk (talk \| contribs) No edit summary
(3 intermediate revisions by one other user not shown)
Line 1: {{~~trope~~work}} ''The Sword of Honour'' is a trilogy by [[Evelyn Waugh]], drawing on his own experiences during [[World War II]]. The three books, later released as a single volume, are ''Men at Arms'' (1952), ''Officers and Gentlemen'' (1955) and ''Unconditional Surrender''(1961). The hero is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic English Roman Catholic family. He has spent his thirties at the family villa in Italy shunning the world after the failure of his marriage and has decided to return to England at the very beginning of the Second World War, in the belief that the creeping evils of modernity, gradually apparent in the [[Dirty Communists\|Soviet Union]] and the [[Those Wacky Nazis\|Nazi Germany]], have become all too clearly displayed as [[Commie Nazis\|a real and embodied enemy]]. Our hero attempts to join the British Army, finally succeeding (thanks to a chance encounter with an acquaintance of Guy's father) with the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. He trains as [[An Officer and Aa Gentleman\|an officer]] and is posted to various centres around Britain. One of the themes is recurring [[Armed Farces\|"flaps"]] or chaos â€” [[Better Than It Sounds\|embarking and disembarking from ships and railway carriages that go nowhere]]. Crouchback meets [[The Brigadier\|Brigadier]] Ben Ritchie-Hook, [[Colonel Badass\|a fire eater]] and Apthorpe, a [[~~Upperclass~~Upper Class Twit\|very eccentric fellow officer]] with an obsession regarding 'porpoises' (i.e: boots) and his prized portable commode. Before being sent on active service, Guy attempts to seduce [[Gold Digger\|Virginia]], secure in the knowledge that the Roman Church still regards her as his wife; she refuses him. He and Ben Ritchie-Hook [[Hilarity Ensues\|share an adventure]] whilst on a top-secret mission in [[More Dakka\|Dakar]]. Apthorpe dies in Freetown, supposedly of a tropical disease; when it is discovered that Guy gave him a bottle of whisky when visiting him in hospital (possibly the cause of death) Crouchback is sent home, having blotted his copybook. Line 14: After the end of the war, Guy meets the daughter of another old Roman Catholic family [[Bittersweet Ending\|and marries her]]. {{tropelist}} * [[An Officer and Aa Gentleman]] - Guy Crouchback, Tommy Blackhouse, Ivor Claire. Averted by Corporal-Major Ludovic, who is later promoted but retains his working-class origins. * [[Armchair Military]] - Colonel 'Jumbo' Trotter, happy to see the war out from a comfortable seated position. * [[Armed Farces]] - Big time. * [[Born in ~~The~~the Wrong Century]] - Guy Crouchback is inspired by the example of an English knight buried beneath the local church. Sir Roger de Waybrook left England to take part in the Crusades, but died in a local brawl before getting even halfway there. * [[Church Militant]] - Uncle Peregrine's fantasy of a pan-European Catholic uprising against the Nazis. * [[Cool Old Guy]] - Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, and probably Colonel Trotter. Line 30: * [[Knight in Shining Armor]]: Guy pretty obviously thinks of himself as this. * [[Those Wacky Nazis]] - Notable by their absence. Apart from the occasional doodlebug, and the Stukas in Crete, only one German soldier (a despatch rider on a Cretan dirt road) ever appears. * [[~~Upperclass~~Upper Class Twit]] - Apthorpe, Major Hound. * [[What Happened to ~~The~~the Mouse?]] - Major Hound's disappearance. After Hound and Ludovic spend some time off-screen during the retreat, only Ludovic appears at the evacuation beach {{spoiler\|wearing Hound's shoulder badges}}. Ludovic merely states to Crouchback a long time later that he cannot remember anything, but his slowly growing mental instability suggests that he knows more than he is telling. {{reflist}} [[Category:Lit Fic]] [[Category:The Fifties]] [[Category:Sword Ofof Honour]] [[Category:~~Trope~~Literature]]