‘Lent [1953] began well. I wrote first pages of novel, very good too. White's [his London club] in an air raid. Then the fog closed in’ – not just literally either. On Ash Wednesday, Waugh ‘resolved to give up opiates for Lent’; less than a month later his diary confessed: ‘Have abandoned resolution to give up narcotics and am giving up wine instead.’ Always mercilessly self-aware, he had recently noted his increasing dependence on drugs and drink to alleviate chronic insomnia, his deteriorating work routines, and uneasily observed ‘A flaw somewhere’ (D 716, 714). Slimming in August can't have helped (‘I am light as a feather and feeble as tissue paper’, L 408). A fog descended. Over the summer and autumn his letters and diary entries reveal regretted quarrels with old friends, twinges of paranoia, and disconcerting lapses of memory whose details were precise, sharp – and wrong. In December he admitted to Nancy Mitford, ‘I am stuck in my book from sheer boredom. I know what to write but just cant make the effort to write it’. After New Year he pathetically told his daughter Margaret, ‘Oh I have been ill since you left. First a cold & then agonising rheumatism. So I am jumping into the first available ship. She goes to Ceylon. I shant come back till I have finished my book.’ (L 415, 417) On board he suffered the acute attack of insanity later described in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Yet by Lent 1954 he was back on form, and in November shared his elation with Nancy Mitford: ‘This book is done at last […] It is short and funny & completes the story I began in Men at Arms which threatened to drag out to the grave’ (L 433). However, he had radically curtailed his original, ambitious plans for a magnum opus in ‘four or five volumes which won't show any shape until the end.’

Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two parts. Book I, Happy Warriors, is primarily concerned with Guy's training as a Commando in Scotland and covers the equivalent period in Waugh's life from November 1940 to January 1941. Interlude, and Book II, In the Picture, draw on Waugh's experiences in Cape Town, Egypt, and during the fall of Crete from February to June 1941.