Disillusionment in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the leitmotif of, disillusionment in the military life of, the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, in Men at Arms Waugh’s first volume of a war trilogy, Sword of Honour, which is based on his own experience of the Second World War. It is a grotesque black comedy on the scheme of a chivalric illusion, associated with severe loss of old battles and a series of anticlimactic military defeats where the British-Indian troops fought against the Turks in 1915-1916 at Kut-al-Imara, a small town in the south of Iraq.