Knighthood Deflowered

OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN (339 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($3.75).

For other embattled Britons, the winter of 1940 may have been their finest hour--but not for Commando Officers and Gentlemen Evelyn Waugh writes about in his second novel about World War II. With his elite brigades buried in Eastern Mediterranean retreat, the boss commandoman in London could count for instant offensive action exactly six men and a pariah captain left at home in a shipping snafu. Desperate for any justifying achievement, the general ordered out these seven, with his press officer, on a radar-smashing raid by submarine on a Channel islet.

No more unwilling warrior could have been found for Operation Popgun than Captain Trimmer, onetime ladies' hairdresser on the Aquitania. But the submarine lost its way, and the trembling Trimmer found himself leading the first Britons since Dunkirk back onto the French coast. Somehow Trimmer's sergeant blew up a rail line, while the press officer quoted tipsy encouragement to the captain. "For God's sake, come on," squeaked Trimmer from the small boat, as the sappers returned. "Be of good comfort, Master Trimmer, and play the man," urged the press officer. "We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out." After the press man edited the exploit, of course, the haircutter became England's darling and the War Cabinet itself deliberated over where his prowess might next be suitably employed.

Captain Trimmer is just one of the odd fish that Evelyn Waugh takes whenever he lets down his nets. This novel is chiefly about officers who have always been gentlemen, particularly that "Christian gentleman,'' Guy Crouchback. It is every bit as good as Men at Arms, whose splendid characterizations and fine writing led many in 1952 to predict that its author had begun the best English fictional account of World War II. Waugh writes of the life and death of ruling-class commandomen with the authority of one who took part in raids on Bardia in Libya and fought in Yugoslavia. His eye for the ridiculous still flashes quick as a pistol. He can still write crushingly of spivvish parvenus and loony Hebridean lairds. But the formerly ferocious satirist continues to broaden and deepen the fascinating experiment, begun in Men at Arms, of doling out uncertain portions of esteem and even affection to such characters as share his 18th century Tory's devotion to God, King and Country. As one result, a somewhat unforgiving melancholy runs through this often very funny book.

As Waugh explains it, Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen, covering the period of the Russo-German alliance, "constitute a whole." He has therefore scrapped his original plan for a trilogy to let these two books stand by themselves, though he plans to "follow the fortunes of the characters through the whole of their war" in later novels. Men at Arms began with Crouchback reading of the Russo-German alliance and rushing in "jubilation" to join a correct, old-line regiment. "A decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms."

Officers and Gentlemen ends, after the rout on Crete and the nearly simultaneous breakup of the Russo-German alliance, with the hero's "deflation." Crouchback finds himself "back after less than two years' pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor." In a last "symbolical act," however, Crouchback burns papers he had brought out from Crete which would have proved that his fellow aristocrat--that faultlessly bred International Equestrian Champion Ivor Claire, whom he had once thought of as "quintessential England"--had funked and fled his command. This, in the relentless author of A Handful of Dust and The Loved One, is something new. In the evolution of Evelyn Waugh, mercy appears to have arrived to season justice.

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