Sent back to the UK in disgrace at the end of the first novel, Guy Crouchback – heir of a declining aristocratic English Roman Catholic family – manages to find a place in a fledgling commando brigade, training on a Scottish island under an old friend, Tommy Blackhouse.

Guy learns to exploit the niceties of military ways of doing things with the assistance of Colonel "Jumbo" Trotter, an elderly Halberdier who knows all the strings to pull.

(Waugh may have based the character of Ludovic on one or two real people: the soldier of fortune and novelist John Lodwick,[1] and/or the future press tycoon and politician Robert Maxwell.

She sends Guy the long way home to England, possibly to prevent him from compromising the cover story worked up to protect Claire from desertion charges.

Officers and Gentlemen was dramatised for television in 1967 and 2001 along with the two other novels in the Sword of Honour trilogy, featuring first Edward Woodward and then Daniel Craig.