354
PARTISAN REVIEW
Holy War has become merely another scuffle among the dishonored,
and Waugh now views the war's larger purposes with blunt contempt.
Nonetheless, devotion to duty is always a virtue, and Waugh con–
tinues to love the Regular Army types
in
all their sacrosanct and irre–
pressible oddness. The most marvelous of these, and to my mind the
finest comic character of the century, is Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, a per–
fectly Dickensian conception, a man whose life is spent in dramatizing
the idea he has of himself. Ritchie-Hook is the incarnation of the
warrior, the one-eyed, battered, indomitable exponent of the art of
"biffing." "The years of peace had been years of unremitting conflict
for him. Wherever there was blood and gun-powder from County Cork
to the Matto Grosso, there was Ritchie-Hook. Latterly he had wandered
about the Holy Land tossing hand-grenades into the front parlours of dis–
sident Arabs."3 In such buoyant and indestructible characters as Ritchie–
Hook, as Jumbo and Tommy Blackhouse, in the less honorable but no
less comic Apthorpe, Hound, and Trimmer, and of course in the rich
accumulation of anecdotes about the eternal mismanagement of war,
is the charm of these novels to be found. The qualities that make them
interesting and worthy are not organic to their structure or their moral
implication, but are there in the things that exist before the reader's
eye, in the events arranged and acted out.
These outward, superficial virtues can be sustained only by a pro–
fessional writer, and the remarkable attractiveness of Waugh and his
fellow entertainers, Graham Greene, Henry Green, and Joyce Cary, is
inseparable from the unobtrusive rectitude, the professional style, of all
their writing. What we feel in them is a kind of superb efficiency in
expending their talents. They seem most of the time to have been able
to calculate just what they can do, and they do it with the strictest
economy of effort. By fully exploiting their comparatively modest talents
3. Ritchie-Hook's original, Lieut. Col. Alfred Daniel Wintle, retired, some–
time of the Royal Artillery, First the Royal Dragoons, and Eleventh Hussars,
recently t urned up in the news. He has been sentenced to six months in prison
for assaulting an aged solicitor whom he believed to have swindled him out
of an inheritance. Wintle ambushed the man, knocked him about, stole his
trousers and was about to fly them from his flagpole in triumph when he was
arrested. He was, naturally, wholly unrepentant, and declared, "It will be a
sad day for this country when an officer and gentleman is not prepared to go
to prison when he thinks he is in the right." As to his fa ilure in completely
"biffing" his foe, he said, "One must expect some casualties. . . . I have been
accustomed to meeting the enemy and trying to trap him wherever I met him."
Wintle's career, like Ritchie-Hook's, is as improbable as the foregoing remarks.
As is the case with Dickens' novels, when the original of a character who seems
unlikely or outrageous can be discovered, one is always struck by the strict
realism of the cornic artist's observation-sometimes even by his understatement.
