Officer And A Gentleman / Literature

• The Alice Network: Captain Cameron is an honorable, kind soldier who would never leave a lady in distress. His gentlemanly qualities only make him more attractive to Eve, who rarely encounters kindness in the course of her life and her short-lived spying career.
• Commissar Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) does his best to be seen as one.
• Despite being a rabble-rousing populist, General Nortier of The Count of Monte Cristo provides a good example of a gentleman soldier behaving honorably to those of the same class, even if on opposing sides. In the backstory which led to Dantes' imprisonment, Franz d'Epinay's father, a Royalist, was caught infiltrating the group of pro-Napoleon soldiers Nortier belonged to and seeing that d'Epinay was a fellow gentleman, Nortier allowed him to duel to the death instead of simply killing him outright.
• Discworld:
  • Subverted in Jingo in the form of Willikins, Vimes' butler-turned-sergeant. When addressing Vimes, Willikins is the picture of politeness - so far so good - but when talking to the men under his charge he turns into a bellowing, foul-mouthed authoritarian. Also played straight with Lord Rust, who is the negative, incompetent, "Blue Blood who is polite to equals and superiors only" variety, with lots of "honor" and not a lot of reason, utterly convinced that their enemy (who has spent the last several decades fighting a variety of enemies and getting really good at it) will "turn and flee the minute they taste cold steel"; he is described in Night Watch as following the "subtract the enemy's casualties from thine own, and if the number is positive, then it was a Glorious Victory" school of strategy.
  • Sergeant Jackrum of Monstrous Regiment fame would tell you that, as a sergeant, Wilikins is neither an officer or a gentleman. Sergeants are crafty bastards, and he would know. Lieutenant Blouse from the same book would fit this trope if it were any other kind of story—he's an officer, a gentleman, and honorable to a fault — but war is a very ugly thing that has no time for honor and chivalry.
• The armies of Victorian Europe in the Flashman novels are full of officers who are jovial, charming, considerate of their men, and thoroughly chivalrous. Naturally, our Fake Ultimate Hero protagonist despises every last one of them.
• Rudyard Kipling's Gentlemen Rankers describes those who failed to be this trope.
  • Kipling also poked fun at this trope, noting how useless most of that book-learnin', college degrees, and gentlemanly chivalry actually are on the battlefield.
  A scrimmage in a Border Station-
  A canter down some dark defile
  Two thousand pounds of education
  Drops to a ten-rupee jezail^note a home-made (and very accurate) Afghan rifle.
  The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
  Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
  No proposition Euclid wrote
  No formulae the text-books know,
  Will turn the bullet from your coat,
  Or ward the tulwar's downward blow.
  Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can
  The odds are on the cheaper man.

  —"Arithmetic on the Frontier" (1886)
• Very prevalent on both the American and Japanese sides in The Great Pacific War. Prisoners are treated fairly, ships go out of their way to rescue enemy survivors, etc. Especially notable for the Japanese as it was uncommon to portray them as noble warriors rather than brutish savages.
• Richard Hannay, the hero of John Buchan's thriller novels, joins the army and serves as an officer in Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast, retiring with distinction at war's end.
• Honor Harrington has its fair share.
  • On the Manticoran side, the most prominent are probably Hamish Alexander and Michael Oversteegen.
    • Oversteegen is particularly notable in that he has every known trait of a Manticoran Upper-Class Twit, belongs to the previously self-serving Conservative party, and seemingly got his first major command because his idiotic, cowardly, self-serving cousin was the Prime Minister. Yet he kicks a truly monumental amount of villainous backside while being a good, honorable, dedicated, responsible, brave, hardworking, and generally brilliant officer who believes in aristocratic responsibility as much as he does aristocratic privilege and has no patience for his incompetent relatives.
    • Hamish Alexander is a completely straight example: Earl of White Haven, brilliant tactician, fleet commander, etc.
  • The Havenite side has its share:
    • Javier Giscard, Admiral and romantic partner of future President Eloise Pritchart.
    • Warner Caslet, who sadly defects to the Manties after his sojourn with Honor on Hades.
    • Thomas Theisman, the man who shot Oscar Saint-Just and arguably the most gentlemanly gentleman in the whole Republic, with a depth of patriotism and loyalty that is quite simply staggering.
  • Grayson Officer Commissions specifically say that the bearer is an Officer and a Gentleman. This causes a minor plot point in one short story when someone points out that they never actually changed the wording when they first recruited female officers so technically speaking the female officers are also considered gentlemen rather than ladies (the semi-feudal nature of Grayson law means that the term Gentleman does have some limited legal standing).
• Frequent theme of the works of German author/philosopher Ernst Jünger. In most of his works of fiction, the title character is an officer and gentleman from a royal background. (Especially Heliopolis and the marble cliffs.) The villains of his works are frequently villainous because they violate the nobleman's obligue.
  • Jünger frequently criticized that this attitude dies out because of modernism and the enlightenment, paving ways for war crimes and genocides.
• Kydd: Subverted with Kydd during Quarterdeck and Tenacious, as well as other "tarpaulin" officers who "came up aft through the hawsehole". While certainly very good at their jobs through experience, they're considered crude by the standards of those who play this trope straight, which is why Kydd begins to resent his fellow officers in Quarterdeck.
  Kydd: I'd rather be cream o' the shit than shit o' the cream, dammit.
  • Played straight with Renzi during those two books, highlighting his status as a Foil to Kydd.
• Captain (later Admiral) John Geary, protagonist of The Lost Fleet is a lone positive example amid a veritable sea of negative ones.
• The McAuslan series depicts Lieutenant Dand McNeill as a typical young gentleman Scottish officer: walking the thin line between managing a platoon of largely Glaswegian soldiers effectively, and doing so to the satisfaction of the Colonel, a much older gentleman officer one step away from retirement. Mc Neill is hailed by his men as a "fly man" - a cunning bastard who leads with style and essential decency.
• In Gene Stratton-Porter's Michael O'Halloran (published 1915), cited to counter the argument of a Royal Brat that gentlemen don't work.
  If the world has any gentlemen it surely should be those born for generations of royal and titled blood and reared from their cradles in every tradition of their rank. Europe is full of them, and many are superb men. I know a few. Now, will you tell me where they are to-day? They are down in trenches six feet under ground, shivering in mud and water, half dead for sleep, food, and rest, trying to save the land of their birth, the homes they own, to protect the women and children they love. They are marching miles, being shot down in cavalry rushes, and blown up in boats they are manning, in their fight to save their countries.
• Ista from Bujold's Paladin of Souls is attracted to a man who fits the trope before ending up with that guy's younger brother who behaves much more casual and considers himself second best at everything. Of course, the older one was taken and undead.
• Jane Austen's Persuasion plays this straight with Captain Wentworth.
• Famously subverted by Wickham in Pride and Prejudice.
  • Played dead straight with Colonel Fitzwilliam and Colonel Forster.
• The Chaste Hero Captain Avery in the book The Pyrates which is a Deconstructor Fleet of pirate movie cliches fits this description perfectly.
• The hares of the Long Patrol army in the Redwall series behave like this (even some of the ones who aren't actually in the Long Patrol). The Long Patrol itself didn't appear by name in the first few books, but grew in importance eventually taking centre stage in (naturally) The Long Patrol.
• Played straight with Colonel Brandon from Sense and Sensibility.
• Peter D'Alembord from Sharpe, a charming, elegant, and well-educated gentleman (who only joined the army because he killed a man in a duel). The title character is often pointed out to not be a gentleman, though an officer, although his conduct towards women is usually better than most of his well-born peers.
  • Captain Fredrickson is a bit rougher around the edges than D'Alembord, but is a highly capable leader of skirmishers who also speaks fluent Spanish, French and German, and spends his free time admiring church architecture, sketching landscapes in pencil, and discussing the merits and flaws of republican governments with American expatriates and French prisoners of war.
• One of the primary themes of Starship Troopers.
• Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo, of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Outbound Flight, qualifies as one, if one given to somewhat underhanded tactics and his own set of morals. However, later-set books have him as an Affably Imperial Cultured Warrior.
• Sten mocks this trope with the incompetent Admiral van Doorman, who prides himself on spit-and-polish while sneering at Army-trained Sten. Yet Sten himself embodies this trope to a certain degree. His Combat Pragmatism is never really seen with regard to women, to the point that it's an Informed Attribute. Doubtless it's to preserve the sympathy of readers who have yet to reach the egalitarian attitudes of the future.
• Capt. Laurence, of Temeraire. He was originally a British Navy captain—where such is apparently expected—before harnessing Temeraire and is still more polished and formal than most of his crew and fellow officers, the Aerial Corps almost necessarily being much less formal. His own crew, out of admiration for him, started taking after his example. He, in turn, began to shed the stiffness in his manners as he embraced his new life.
• The Unknown Soldier has the archetypal Captain Kariluoto, who starts as a White Prince Ensign Newbie, and Lieutenant Koskela, who started as Working-Class Hero and owes his gentlemanly nature not to Blue Blood, but to being a Farm Boy.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, all Barrayaran officers are expected to be, and sometimes they even are:
  • Aral and Miles play this trope to a tee. However, Aral's reputation as "The Butcher of Komarr" does not.
  • Cordelia—as a captain in the Betan Expeditionary Force — is the female equivalent… as contrasted with Cordelia's prior tour in the Betan Astronomical Survey, where being captain was more like being Team Mom.
  • A young example (and lampshade) is Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan in Cetaganda who early in the book reminds himself that he is "an officer and a nobleman."
  • Miles' relative Ivan also shows quite a few traits of this. Ivan—a soldier in the Barrayaran Imperial Service—employs some irony when asked, "Are you a hired killer?" He replies, "Well, in a ''sense''." Further, although he has the manners and breeding for this trope, he ends up being the beleaguered enlisted man to Miles most of the time.
  • Being a blend of Samurai and Prussian Junkers, the Vor of Barrayar are expected to act this way whether or not they are technically officers, being a class (excuse me, 'warrior caste') of Officers and Gentlemen.
• Several examples in War and Peace. Two prominent ones are the French captain Ramballe and Field Marshal Kutuzov. War isn't very personal; most prisoners throughout the book are treated relatively well, even equally.

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