Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy

Evaluating Waugh's Final Masterpiece

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) might have been the finest novelist of his day, though of course he had competition. Even if you limit it to Catholic novelists, he had plenty of competition, for the early twentieth century saw a flowering of Catholic literary activity, among which included several converts, such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Selma Lagerlof. Two of these, Lagerlof and Francois Mauriac, won the Nobel Prize for literature during their lifetimes, despite being practicing Catholics in an already secularized Europe. Wherever he ranks among all these, contemporaries had no doubt as to the greatness of his writing. Men as different as George Orwell and Graham Greene, who called Waugh “the greatest novelist of my generation,” acknowledged the power of his elegant English prose.

Before tackling The Sword of Honour trilogy, I had only read two of Waugh’s novels: Helena, his historical novel about the mother of Constantine the Great, which he apparently thought his best work, and Brideshead Revisited, normally acknowledged to be his masterpiece, about the artist Charles Ryder’s relationship the Marchmains, a Catholic aristocratic family. Sword of Honour concerns the second World War exploits of Guy Crouchback, a divorced Englishman from a Catholic recusant family, who signs up to fight in the army. Over three books, Waugh traces his adventures and at the same time satirizes both the foibles of the modern British Army but also modern British society more generally.

Men at Arms (1952) begins in Italy where Guy, living on in the old family villa, visits the tomb of his ancestor Gervase, an English knight who died on crusade, touching his sword and swearing to fight the new enemy. Guy sees the fight against Nazi Germany as a crusade, seeing in them the “modern age” writ large, which he largely despises. Guy gets himself into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, Guy is subjected to a series of postings throughout Britain; several times, his troops prepares to embark only to have their orders change at the last minute. Waugh depicts the chaos of the early days of the war through Guy’s misadventures. Before he heads off for his first mission, Guy tries to bed his ex-wife Virginia but fails. Eventually the Halberdiers make a faintly ridiculous attack on Dakar in Africa, where his friend Agthorpe dies following the battle. When the army discovers Agthorpe died after Guy gave him a bottle of whisky in his hospital bed, Guy is sent home.

Officers and Gentleman (1955) picks up the story as Guy attempts to get back into the war by changing outfits. He becomes part of a commando squad, and is stationed in Egypt, along with Tommy Blackhouse, the old friend whom Virginia left him for originally (she has been divorced and married again, and is called Mrs. Troy throughout most of the three novels). Meanwhile, one of his old Halberdier friends, a man named Trimmer, meets up with Virginia in Scotland, and engages in an affair with him. Meanwhile, back in Egypt, Guy is sent along with his commando unit to Crete, where the British are soon overrun and have to make an ignominious retreat, in which Guy and several others barely escape the island. While recovering in Egypt, he finds that one soldier whom he thought the “flower of English chivalry” had deserted his post in the evacuation, and while one of the men who escaped with him appears to have saved him by murdering several of the men in the small boat with him.

Unconditional Surrender (1961) brings Guy story to a conclusion, in which, after loitering around London looking for an assignment, but has trouble getting back into the field, as he is more than forty years old by this time and the army is unwilling to use such men for combat. While in England, his father passes away, and he attends the funeral, finding that his father has left him and his sister a legacy. Meanwhile, Virginia, now out of money, finds herself living in London, and becomes involved unwillingly with Trimmer once again. Guy eventually gets appointed to an intelligence unit but is injured while parachute training. While recovering, Virginia becomes pregnant by Trimmer, and seeks him out, to see if he will have her back. They marry, and for a month live as husband and wife again, before he goes to Italy where his unit is stationed. From there, he is sent to Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with Yugoslav partisans fighting the Nazis. There, he finds the partisans to be as unlikeable as the men they are fighting, and tries to save hundred or so Jews from their depredations. While in Yugoslavia, Virginia is killed by a bomb in London. The novel ends with Guy having sold the family villa in Italy, and remarried to a local Catholic girl in his home village, and taken up farming.

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Such is the outline of Sword of Honour. The greatness of the story comes from Guy’s gradual disillusionment with his “crusade” against modernity. The fecklessness of British army and political officials, the cowardice and lack of honor in British troops—Ludovic, a man who escapes with him from Crete, deserted and murdered two men to do so but is later made an officer—all convince him that the war had been a great waste. This tracks with Waugh’s own experiences of the war, on which the trilogy was based, which convinced him that the Allies were not that much superior to the Axis powers after all.

This is symbolized the image of the sword, invoked in the tomb of Gervase Croucback, which in Unconditional Surrender becomes transformed into a symbol of the artificiality and hypocrisy of modernity. That novel begins with people lining up to see “The Sword of Stalingrad,” a ceremonial sword made as a gift to the Soviet allies by the order of the king. The narrator never says so, but it is clear that it symbolized Britain throwing in its lot with a foe just as awful as the Nazis, as indeed communism was in Waugh’s eyes.

Pretty much all of the ideological justifications for the war are depicted as hollow in all three novels. The one system of belief that comes off well, at least by comparison, was Waugh’s own Catholicism. Portrayed as a universal system of belief, Guy visits priests for confession in Egypt and Yugoslavia, all the while trying to maintain his somewhat arid faith. Virginia converts to Catholicism, just before they are married. Yet even here, not all is perfect. The priest to whom he confesses in Egypt turns out to be a spy for the Axis powers. And when he tries to pay a priest who says a mass for the soul of Virginia, this leads the Yugoslavs to remove the priest, suspicious of his contact with a British officer.

What looks like Waugh’s summation on the War he puts into the mouth of Madame Kanyi, a Hungarian Jewish woman whom Guy attempts to get of Yugoslavia but fails to do so. In a speech to Guy, she says to him

‘There was a time when I felt that all I needed for happiness was to leave. Our people felt that. They must move away from evil. Some hope to find homes in Palestine. Most look no further than Italy—just to cross the water, like crossing the Red Sea.

Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of a national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardship in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’

‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’

Ludovic, the soldier who murdered two men but became an officer, writes a trashy novel that becomes a best seller called Death Wish at the end of Unconditional Surrender, a fine example of Waugh’s macabre sense of humor.

In the end, all of the people who possess some sense of honor wind up dead by the end of trilogy. Madame Kanyi and her husband are murdered by the partisans after Guy leaves, Ritchie-Hook, Guy’s commanding officer in the Halberdiers, a slightly comic but upright man of old fashioned honor, dies in a pointless attempt to attack a machine gun nest. Even Virginia, after a life of dissipation, dies because of a noble act: she sends her son away to Guy’s sister Angela, so he will be safe, which saves his life. The modern world which Guy comes back to after the war is simply not one in which genuine honor can survive.

Waugh took nearly ten years to finish the novel, and by the time he finished, he had some distance from the war. This along with his jaundiced view of modern life gave him the ability to see through the official pieties of the war which he puts to good use. He saw, as many did not, that the war was fought for much more primal reasons than the ideological ones propounded by the Allies and the Axis powers. Madame Kanyi expresses this in her speech, but so does the officer Cottlemore, who Guy meets in Yugoslavia, who tells him that in war it is all about loyalty to country and race. His perception of the influence of American power is especially prescient in Unconditional Surrender in the number of American soldiers swarming around London and in particular Lieutenant Padfield, an American soldier whose exact role is never specified but is always showing up somewhere. He is clearly conducting clandestine operations of some sort whose purpose is shrouded from Guy. The nickname his British hosts give him—“Loot”—suggests the real American motive for the war is more base than a “war for democracy.”

I read Sword of Honour after reading (somewhere I can’t recall) that it was superior to Brideshead Revisited. I suppose in its sweep and in its keen depiction of the war, it does sound a “grander” note than the earlier novel. But I am not sure if it possesses the unity of design and execution that a single novel can achieve, and I must admit I found Brideshead more enjoyable. Perhaps because that is because Brideshead portrays the world that he loved, the vanishing world of recusant Catholicism, rather than the drab, honorless world of modernity. The end of Unconditional Surrender finds Guy remarried with two sons of his own, but Waugh changed the ending, perhaps not wanting there to be any escape for Guy from the dilemmas of the modern world. Later editions restored the ending with two sons, including my edition of the novel.

Even with the more “positive” ending, however, the conclusion of Sword of Honour appears a somewhat lugubrious affair. For someone who hated the modern world so much, his final fictional response seems not that different from Voltaire’s in Candide. In a world from which honor, nobility have withdrawn from public life, Guy goes back to his family and his farm, from public affairs to “cultivating his garden.” That is not totally true. Guy also had the solace of his faith, a solace which sadly was taken from Waugh toward the end of his life.

The Catholicism which he embraced changed rapidly because of the changes the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) introduced into the Catholic Church, above all its liturgy. Waugh detested the new, vernacular form of worship mandated after the Council; a story relates that he would take an ear trumpet to mass with him, and when the time came for the congregation to say the required responses, Waugh, who did have difficulties hearing, would put the trumpet to his ear and say in a loud voice “huh? What? Can’t hear a thing!”

Even if he never found an antidote to the technological wasteland of modernity, Waugh has left us at least with a treasure trove of satire, depicting our modern life with all its foibles, that is unmatched and certainly unsurpassed. Sword of Honour, along with Brideshead Revisited, are testaments to one of the great prose stylists of the English language, even if they do not provide a happy take on modern life. Hopefully, if Waugh is currently enduring a long stay in Purgatory, he can at least take solace in that.