Officers and gentlemen. Trilogy. In I.

In the Romannaya Trilogy “Officers and Gentlemen” (“Sword of Honor”, ​​1952–1961), the English writer Ivlin WHO, known for his tendency to pass the killer-ironic sentences not only to individual characters, but also by entire estates, turns a merciless satirical view of beauty And the pride of Britain is its army. Transferring the fate of the lieutenant, and subsequently Captain Gai Cruchbek, serving in the Royal Corps of Alabardians during the Second World War, the author debunks a sovereign myth of the military - “builders of the empire”. The main admiration of the protagonist “armed people” and his exalted dreams of valor, exploits, heroism and ministry of the Fatherland are little like a sharp disappointment, which ends with the “unconditional surrender” of the former romantic ideals of Cruchbek in the face of the unsightly reality of the deciduous military engine of “good old good England " - with its bureaucracy, careerism, official reading and corruption, stupidity, pomp, cowardice and sometimes senseless cruelty...