This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Over a pint recently, a friend described how, after leaving the infantry, he underwent a prolonged period of physical and psychological exertion in the hope of joining the Special Forces. Gruelling stuff. Despite years of training and an impressive service record, he didn’t make the cut.

Yet Evelyn Waugh, at 37 and running to fat after two sedentary decades veering between the bottle and the typewriter, joined 8 Commando. He had been recommended by a friend to Brigadier Sir Joseph Laycock at the bar of White’s. Laycock, who admired Waugh’s work, took him on because their mutual friend said he was “often funnier in fact than in fiction” and “could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war”.

To spend an afternoon in Waugh’s company is to spend time in another world, where the seemingly impossible is probable, and the romantic is routine. His novels and his life — at times almost the stuff of fiction — are a window onto a set of ideals and experiences barely recognisable today. His work and biography challenge contemporary mores. They confront our society’s views on death, conflict, duty and corporate identity. I can’t help but think that ours are found wanting.

Waugh’s novels are striking for their very lack of fiction. The lines between his own experience and the drama of his fiction blur. When Waugh made Basil Seal, the anti-hero of Put Out More Flags, a bribe-taking billeting officer, he knew the tyranny of such an official knocking at the door as his wife’s family home, Pixton, was overrun by 26 “frightful” evacuees.

Waugh was living there because he had rented his own home, Piers Court, to Dominican nuns who used it as a girls’ school — a fate shared by Guy Crouchback’s family home in Men at Arms. His own experience of the evacuation of Crete is barely altered in Officers and Gentlemen. The raids described in diary and novel share almost identical details.

Waugh’s characters and conversations thinly mask his own outlook and that of his peers

His characters, far from the product of an overactive imagination, were usually lifted from life. Laycock became the enigmatic Richie Hook in the Sword of Honour trilogy. (Both the man and his fictionalised ideal used to set booby traps, Hook for his officers, Laycock for his wife.) In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s infamous first meeting with Sebastian Flyte (when Sebastian did a “technicolour yawn” through the window) was lifted from Waugh’s own undergraduate set. The list goes on.

By his own admission, Waugh intended to use real life incidents and individuals in his work. On leaving the army, he wrote, “I don’t want any more experiences in life. I have quite enough bottled and carefully laid in the cellar, some still ripening, most ready for drinking.” The novelist combines flair for embellishment with a keen eye for truth: Waugh’s characters and conversations thinly mask his own outlook and that of his peers.

Waugh’s fascination with war and the military began early. The ambiguity of being named “Evelyn” lent a Boy-Named-Sue quality to his character. He managed to repel would-be bullies by a mixture of physical courage, violence and by claiming affinity with his namesake Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood V.C., a hero of the Indian Mutiny and defeater of the Zulus.

I delighted in discovering that his androgynous name continued to cause confusion — even heartbreak — throughout Waugh’s life. Arriving in Abyssinia in 1935, he was greeted by an Italian press officer clutching a bouquet of red roses in a “high state of amorous excitement”.

In the summer of 1915 Waugh aspired to serve Lord Kitchener whilst working as a messenger boy in the War Office, but was never summoned. His favourite schoolmaster at Lancing was the brilliant J.F. Roxburgh who was recommended for the M.C. and whose younger brother was killed in the First World War. In chapel, the names of old boys killed at the Western Front were read out each day.

Solemnity mingled with the absurd. The headmaster’s wife, a blunder-bouche, said on seeing new photographs of old boys killed in action being hung, “Isn’t it nice to see a second row go up.” Around this time his brother, Alec, left Sherborne for officer training and the trenches, just as the news of their uncle’s death from a shell-blast reached the family home. Alec later went missing behind enemy lines and became a prisoner of war.

The macabre was ever-present in Waugh’s childhood. He was fascinated by the stuffed monkey in his aunts’ house that had been brought to England from Africa and promptly died of sunstroke. His uncle Alick returned from service in the Royal Navy with a Tasmanian wife, but promptly died of malaria.

His maternal grandfather, a magistrate, died of a tropical disease whilst serving in India. His paternal grandfather, a doctor, died from pneumonia after falling ill whilst out shooting. A close friend from Lancing and Oxford died of blackwater fever in Nigeria. Another school contemporary shot himself in India.

His writing was saturated with the morbid and bizarre. Basil Seal’s mother and sister dote on him, but harbour a wish he might be killed in action and thus finally be proven useful rather than a disgrace. Basil’s character amalgamated the nastier sides of Nancy Mitford’s husband, and her cousin “Baz” Murry, both Balliol men like Seal.

Murry covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist and died in circumstances one might think an overreach of fiction. After falling into a state of drunken disillusionment after a series of failed affairs, he caught a fatal virus from an ape he bought on the docks of Valencia, with which he was cavorting in his hotel room.

When the Second World War broke out, Waugh was chomping at the bit. Friends such as Graham Greene and Tom Burns joined the Ministry of Information, but Waugh told his journal “my inclinations are all to join the army as a private”. He saw a symbolic difference between fighting as a soldier and serving as a civilian and wanted to do his part.

But it wasn’t straightforward. Then as now the Army was a bastion of bureaucracy. Waugh pillories the Army’s priorities when the hero of his Sword of Honour trilogy first attempts to gain a commission: the recruiting officer tells Guy the nation has learned its lesson after throwing away the pick of a generation as cannon fodder in the last war. “But I’m not the pick of the nation,” he protests. “I’m natural fodder. I’ve no dependents. I’ve no special skill in anything. What’s more I’m getting old. I’m ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.”

The protest fails. Guy’s particulars are filed in Confidential Registers, there to rest perpetually unexamined. Waugh failed his eye test when trying to join the Marines; a “friendly colonel” at the Admiralty asked him to read a billboard across the street, adding cheerily, “Most of your work will be done in the dark.”

Reverence for tradition, sacrifice and service have been swapped for scorn

We can also perceive Waugh’s attitude to tradition and corporate identity. He adored his mess at Chatham — “like a senior common room without the bore of dons’ talk”, where the only intellectual stimulation was “attempting to convince the Protestant chaplain of the authenticity of Our Lord’s miracles”.

Dining in the mess in Men at Arms, a young Cambridge graduate, Sarum-Smith, deplores the pomp at dinner, saying, “They even make a drill movement out of eating.” Later, however, Waugh uses this to make a serious point about the power of tradition. The conventions of the mess fall by the wayside at a temporary camp, and without structure or leadership, the Halberdiers lose all sense of purpose as a military unit. Disillusionment also corrupts their sense of purpose as individuals.

Amongst Richie Hook’s priorities on his return to camp is not just the re-establishment of drill, lectures and night exercises, but an insistence that officers live and dine in the mess. This, more than anything, re-establishes the sorry unit. At dinner the enigmatic brigadier sits amongst the men and, in the absence of a padre to say Grace, bangs the table with the handle of his fork, saying simply and loudly, “Thank God.” Even without the regimental silver and campaign trophies, the rituals and customs unite the men.

This sense of corporate pride and obligation to our fellows is something today’s society seems to have lost. Our traditions should bind us together. They might take some getting used to, but they work across class and background to incorporate us into the culture of our institutions. Moreover, they bind us to those who have gone before, who might have some wisdom to share.

As G. K. Chesterton said, “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead … All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

We are too quick to silence the past and in doing so we cut ourselves adrift. Might this generation, obsessed as it is with marginalised voices, re-enfranchise them?

Waugh was motivated by his love of country and belief in her virtues. Sure, there were knee-jerk patriots like the character who “had no illusions about his abilities, but believed, justly, that he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King’s enemies to shoot at”. But more than that, we see deeper values planted in his prose.

As Lady Seal looks across London during an air raid, she recalls the history she had learned in the schoolroom: “a simple tale of the maintenance of right against the superior forces of evil and the battle honours of her country rang musically in her ears — Crecy, Agincourt, Cadiz, Blenheim, Gibraltar, Inkerman, Ypres”. However, when England and the Soviet Union formed an allegiance, this was all called into question for Waugh. It turned the conflict into “a sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts”.

Waugh’s novels do not glamorise war. They reveal its frustrations and follies more than its frays. One pundit takes as axiomatic that there will be no air attacks on London. Another, the political bore Arthur Box-Bender, avers, “I don’t see it as a soldier’s war at all.” Instead, he claims, it will be entirely economic.

Waugh himself was more pragmatic. He discouraged his friend John Betjeman, deemed medically unfit by the RAF, from joining a defence unit because “the only way to bring this business to a happy conclusion is to kill a great number of Germans”. Richie Hook is chiefly concerned with “biffing” the enemy.

At the war’s outbreak, Waugh’s characters and real-life peers promptly reported to their yeomanry or old regiments. It’s a different story now. The overwhelming response to Rishi Sunak’s national service scheme was mockery. The Army Reserve strength in January 2024 was 26,310 — a 4.7 per cent decrease on the previous year, despite conflict in Europe. We now have what retired Air Marshall Edward Stringer calls a “a shopfront military”, concealing “precious little on the shelves and no production line behind it”. Even if defence spending was raised to 3 per cent of GDP, would our citizens answer the call?

Reference to tradition and reverence of sacrifice and service have been swapped for scorn of the establishment and unconditional surrender to online trends. What are we offering to the young men idolising monster-goons such as Andrew Tate?

Our society doesn’t seem ready to face the facts of mortality. We throw money at avoiding death, but try as we might we can’t. If Waugh’s generation would find our aversion to death puzzling, they would be dumbfounded by the irony of our attitude toward assisted suicide. Waugh himself, who didn’t lack physical courage, could not countenance being taken PoW. He wanted to ask a padre if it would be considered suicide if he drowned in an attempt to swim back to Egypt — the implication being that even in the most desperate circumstances, the deliberate throwing away of life was immoral.

To spend an afternoon with Waugh is to spend time with a member of a generation who set great store by life and yet were not afraid of death. I suppose they weren’t, ultimately, thinking about death — they were thinking about the things that matter in life and the world. Weighed against freedom from tyranny and the dignity of their country and loved ones, their lives were not so important.

I wonder if the same moral perspective is still possible.