Officers and gentlemen. Trilogy

In the novel trilogy “Officers and Gentlemen” (“Sword of Honor”, ​​1952–1961), the English writer Ivlin Wu, known for his tendency to pass the killer-ironic sentences not only to individual characters, but also for the entire classes, the merciless satirical view of the beauty and pride of Britain turns to the whole estate. - Her army. Clearing the fate of the lieutenant, and later Captain Gai Cruchbek, who was 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 with “armed people” and his exalted dreams of valor, exploits, heroism and serving the Fatherland are little like a sharp disappointment, which ends with the “unconditional surrender” of the former romantic ideals of Crauchbek 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