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PARTISAN REVIEW
life was completely recreated. They were to stay there until Easter–
a whole term." Boys' schools, like Regular Army officers, are survivals
of a happier civilization, "where differences of rank were exactly de–
fined and frankly accepted." In England, of course, both the Army
and schools are very different to what they are here. Somehow, and
with a minimum of transmutation, the values that inform the life of a
decent English school tend to inform the life of English Regular Army
officers. The character they ideally produce is the same, "salty, with–
drawn, incorrigible." D. W. Brogan once remarked that England is the
only country in the world where being a school-boy is an end in itself.
The standard by which this end is justified is the gentlemanly charac–
ter, the still most highly cherished trophy of English social life, the
raison d'etre
of "people who had represented their country in foreign
places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent
and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming,
unambitious people, of independent judgment and marked eccentrici–
ties." These are the people whom Waugh has more and more come to
value above all others. Although very much aware of how crusty these
ideas must seem in modern England, Waugh's faith in the goodness
and trueness, if not in the efficacy of this ideal, is unwavering. In fact,
his conception of the life and character of an officer and a gentleman
is virtually Kipling's.
The reader may recall how in
Stalky
&
Co.
all the aggressive pranks
and escapades of the boys in school seemed actually to be dress re–
hearsals for the high destiny of directing the course of a great Empire
and keeping the peace on the Northwest frontier, and how in the ex–
traordinary last chapter of the book when all the old boys meet again,
Stalky's exploits with his faithful natives and his Martini rifle are at–
tributed to the values exemplified in the life of the school. Waugh is
slightly more skeptical about the possibilities of heroic success in action
than Kipling, yet his great hero, Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, under–
stands his profession as Stalky did his and as countless good English
gentlemen did theirs. "For this remarkable warrior the image of war was
not hunting or shooting; it was the wet sponge on the door, the hedge–
hog in the bed; or, rather, he saw war itself as a prodigious booby trap."
There is a good deal about this boyish ethos that we can envy and
admire: it may enable men to maintain an audacious gaiety amid the
circumstances of modern war, to experience the erosiveness of Army
life as a series of comic misadventures, or to keep their sense of pur–
posiveness intact amid the fumblings of military recalcitrance and
stupidity. It may even tend to mitigate some of the horrors of combat.
