This paper aims at exploring the leitmotif of, disillusionment in the military life of, the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, in Men at Arms Waugh’s first volume of a war trilogy, Sword of Honour, which is based on his own experience of the Second World War. It is a grotesque black comedy on the scheme of a chivalric illusion, associated with severe loss of old battles and a series of anticlimactic military defeats where the British-Indian troops fought against the Turks in 1915-1916 at Kut-al-Imara, a small town in the south of Iraq.
