As the series marks its 50th anniversary, another conflict is breaking out
In one of the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the central character Guy Crouchback vacates his Italian castle in 1939 once the approaching conflagration can no longer be ignored. “He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness,” Waugh writes of his honourable, fallible stand-in. “But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” The looming catastrophe was, in all its awful novelty, the birth pangs of our own age.
