A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

Chapter Ten

The Last Battle

1

582 The Last Battle
In US this chapter was called The Death Wish. EW wanted in SH to reduce any sub-Freudian implications suggested by the original title; he was probably aware by 1960 of the many adverse criticisms made of Freud’s theory of the death instinct (see my note to page 363).
Nevertheless there still remain people in this chapter who exhibit a form of what might be considered a death instinct : Guy for one tells the priest in confession that he wishes to die. General Whale, Virginia Troy and Ritchie-Hook too dwell on the possibility of death; and Ludovic entitles his great romantic novel The Death Wish. One might also consider that, for EW, Britain has embraced a deadly opponent by supporting Communist forces in Yugoslavia, where this chapter is mainly set.
This chapter begins in February 1944.

582 The Dakota
The Douglas Dakota C-47 was first built in the United States in 1935. It became the most familiar aircraft in much of the world for the next twenty years, first as an airliner and cargo transport and then as military transport. Its usefulness was such that even today there are about 700 still flying in all parts of the world.

582 Bari
ancient Italian city on the Adriatic Sea, the base of the military mission to Yugoslavia

583 mezzanine
an intermediate storey in a building between two main ones; often it can resemble a gallery or balcony.

584 the officer whose name he had never learned
This major is the brother of Grace-Groundling-Marchpole again.

584 the Jugs
i.e. the Yugoslavs (slang). The J is pronounced in the English manner.

585 Queen Alexandra’s nurses
This queen (1844-1925), wife of King Edward VII, founded the Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1902. It became known as Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps in 1949 when it was amalgamated with the Territorial Army Nursing Service.

585 Uniate Abyssinians
This group of clergymen and students had submitted to the Roman Church when Italy had occupied Abyssinia in 1936. The Abyssinians (or Ethiopians as they are known today) had their own Christian church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which had been cut off from the rest of Christianity for more than a thousand years, though it managed to maintain a representative in Jerusalem throughout the millennium. They had therefore developed their own liturgy and customs which made them entirely distinct from their fellow churches. Their chief doctrinal difference was, however, to affirm that Christ had only one nature, which they considered both human and divine (the monophysite heresy). During the brief period of Italian rule the Catholics hoped to encourage unity with and conformity in the Ethiopian church.

585 tukals and fanes
EW was very familiar with Abyssinian practices, having visited the country three times in the 1930’s. In Remote People, his book on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, he described tukals as being round native huts, thatched and windowless. The word fane is occasionally met in English texts and means a temple or shrine.

585 ciphereens
women employed for coding and secretarial duties. I have not found this word in any dictionary that I have consulted. Nor (as I write) does it trouble Google, but in my reading I have come across the word cipherine in a diplomatic context before, in Lawrence Durrell’s accounts of his career in the foreign service.

585 W.A.A.F.s
women who are members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

587 A woman’s only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke
A quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s The Betrothed. This is a humorous poem (inspired by a bizarre divorce case) in which a man prefers his old love, cigars, to his new love, his wife Maggie. It ends :

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba — I hold to my first-sworn vows.
If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for Spouse!

2

588 Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?
This is the first (1865) of the political or Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). It tells (among other plots) the story of Lady Glencora M’Cluskie, a young heiress who toys with a swashbuckling Irish adventurer named Burgo Fitzgerald before settling for a safe marriage and dutiful life with Plantagenet Palliser, the heir to a dukedom. The woman who requires our forgiveness is named Alice Vavasor, and the fault that needs amendment is that of jilting a boring man before finally bowing to her inevitable fate, which is to marry him after all.

3

589 amanuensis
a writer’s assistant who does the physical work of writing

4

590 cortile
courtyard (Italian)

590 Zurbarán
Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Spanish painter of great skill in depicting shadows. In his best paintings he was able to express an intense religious devotion through minute realism.

590 Balliol 1921-1924
Cattermole is saying that Guy was at Balliol College, Oxford, between those years, at the same time as himself.

590 with the bloods
i.e. the group of young men who lived a fashionable, wealthy, sporting life at university.

591 a friend of Sligger’s
‘Sligger’ was the nickname of Francis Fortescue Urquhart, the Dean of Balliol (1863-1934). He was the first Catholic to become a don at Oxford since the Reformation, so it would be natural for Guy to gravitate towards him. He was famous for his ability to pick out and encourage young men of talent (and beauty). EW was at Hertford College in the same period and took such a dislike to Sligger that he bellowed out obscene rhymes below his window at night, accusing him, almost certainly unjustly, of sleeping with men (to the tune of Here we go gathering nuts in May). The reason for his dislike was that Sligger had influenced an excellent scholar named Richard Pares to give up his close friendship with EW and concentrate on his studies. Pares then took a first-class degree and went on to become a Professor of History.

591 ‘I was never a blood.’
Guy’s estimate of himself is very different from other people’s views of him.

591 the Union
the Oxford University Union, a forum for discussion and debate and a testing ground for many of the future political leaders of the country

591 the Sixth Offensive
As explained later by Brigadier Cape (page 595), this is not an offensive by the Partisans. It is a German offensive against them. The Germans regularly launched large mopping-up operations intended to trap and eliminate partisan pockets but some of the Yugoslavs always managed to escape and re-form elsewhere.

591 crocked up
i.e. he became disabled. The reason is not clear.

591 The partisans never leave their wounded.
i.e., they always kill them rather than have them fall into the hands of the Germans.

591 The position is fluid
a euphemism for lack of knowledge of precise details

591 a royalist government in exile squatting in London
The aim of the Communists and their many supporters was to discredit this successor of the old government of Yugoslavia, now detached from the field of battle. They wished the allies to support their partisans with weaponry and ammunition and to cease helping the royalist groups in Yugoslavia. Their purpose was all the more easy to achieve as the royalists tended not to opt for all-out, sacrificial attacks in the supposed manner of the partisans and could be easily labelled as co-operators with the Germans, especially as there was a process of betrayal to the Germans of one group of liberationists by the other. In such politics of propaganda and betrayal, the Communists were far the more successful.

591-592 The partisans are pinning down three times as many troops as the whole Italian campaign.
This so-called fact was urged to impress upon the leaders of the West the effectiveness of the Partisan campaigns in Yugoslavia. As Cattermole’s own reluctant words go on to demonstrate, this statement is both ludicrous and untrue.

592 von Weich’s Army Group
Maximilian Baron von Weichs (not Weich) (1881-1954) was a distinguished field marshal who in 1943 and 1944 commanded the German troops in the Balkans after having served on the Russian front.

592 Cetniks and Ustachi
For the Chetniks (as we spell it today) see my long note to page 464. What Cattermole is doing is identifying the royalist guerrilla forces as the enemy, as if they were in the pay of the Germans. This is of course the final end of the propaganda of labelling, to successfully identify your rivals as the enemy of the good. To call them Quislings (collaborators) is adequate condemnation in many people’s eyes, whether a just estimate or not. Some mud sticks.
The Ustase (modern spelling) were a far more likely enemy to the West than the Chetniks. They were agitators for Croatian independence who had developed a fascist outlook before the war and were put into power in an independent Croatia when Germany overran Yugoslavia in 1941. They set about exterminating the Serb, Jewish and Gypsy minorities in Croatia with a brutality that shocked even the Germans. Their power lasted to the end of the war, when their leaders were obliged to flee and Croatia was reintegrated into Yugoslavia. Their activities provide one reason why the Serb-Croat troubles of the 1990’s were so bloody-minded.
The Chetniks and the Ustase disliked each other quite as much as both hated the Communists, so the situation was certainly complicated, however simple Cattermole’s appreciation of it seems to be.

592 Bulgarians too
Bulgaria had been forced to declare war on Britain and the United States in December 1941 as a consequence of the German domination of the Balkans. As a reward, the Bulgarians had been allowed to annex part of the Yugoslav state of Macedonia. Their officials there therefore constituted part of the authority against which the Partisans were fighting.

592 not all the regiments are quite up to strength
In other words, the map is a representation of falsehood.

592 We had to arm ourselves
Cattermole’s use of the word we indicates what we have already suspected, that his whole heart is in the Partisan fight.

592 to be used against our own people
There were indeed examples of this happening, but also examples of the reverse - Partisan action against the Chetniks.

592 Pan-Slavism
Already in 1944 a historical rather than a living concept, Pan-Slavism was a nineteenth century idealistic movement which looked for the unity of the Slav peoples of eastern Europe and the fulfilment of their historic mission to save and dominate Europe. By World War II it had foundered on intense and unbridgeable national and religious rivalries. Nevertheless some of the Slavs looked to Russia for leadership, an aspiration which suited the Soviet leaders though Tito was soon to become suspicious of Russian designs in Yugoslavia. Cattermole’s enthusiasm runs away with him when he describes Pan-Slavism as being as strong as it was in the time of the Czars.

593 There’s no doubt it’s genuine, I suppose?
There should be considerable doubt. The rumpus may easily have been manufactured to secure Tito’s unquestioned command and to put the British further in his debt.

593 there must be a means of communication between Tito’s chaps and Mihajlovic’s
The Brigadier has latched onto a point Cattermole is anxious to downplay.

593 He was dealt with
i.e. in a typically euphemistic phrase, he was murdered. EW gives us sobering information : we now know what happens to those the partisans consider enemies or traitors.

594 he proclaimed exultantly
Cattermole’s panegyric of the Partisans, and especially of the sexless Amazons, teeters on the edge of ludicrousness.

594 All Souls
After his degree course at Balliol Cattermole entered for and won a scholarship to All Souls College, the graduate college at Oxford. He would have spent a minimum of seven years in this college researching his thesis.

594 ‘Cattermole’s Redundances’
There is no such book, of course. But its full title does reveal a debate that was going on among philosophers of the time.
Empirical philosophers held that all claim to knowledge of the world can be justified only by experience. Hence they held that knowledge derived only from reason was limited and usually did not exist. Since they thought the nature of the world could not be discovered purely through reason, they came into conflict with the Rationalists, who held that truth could be discovered through the use of reason, not only in mathematics and allied disciplines but in metaphysics and ethics.
It seems from his political attitudes and from the fact that he has discovered weaknesses in empiricism that he calls redundances, Cattermole is a rationalist. Certainly Communists took a strong rationalist line in their theoretical writings.

594 on the other side
i.e. in Yugoslavia

594 our G2
Second on this staff, i.e. the unnamed major

594 You haven’t got a parachute badge up
Of course Guy did not qualify for this distinction on his uniform, but Ludovic’s report had given the impression he had. To be qualified for his wings, Guy would have had to do five parachute jumps, four in training and one operational. We know he has done only one.

595 The situation, as I see it, is rather different.
Brigadier Cape’s version accords not only more closely with common sense but also with the facts, though the German evacuation of Greece started not in the summer but on 18th October 1944. The Allied invasion of southern France (the Côte d’Azur) began on 15th August 1944.

595 Our job is simply to do all we can to hurt the enemy.
It was on this criterion that the British and, more reluctantly, the Americans supported Tito and his Partisans rather than Mihailovic and the royalists.

596 Apulian coast
the southern Adriatic coast of Italy, home of ancient tribes and medieval dukedoms. The region is now called Puglia.

596 Foggia
a city on the Puglia tableland inland from the coast and at that time more comfortable to live in than Bari. The capture of its sizeable military airfields in 1943 was an important success for the allied cause. Foggia then became the base for offensive operations by bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force.

596 magistras
i.e. higher officers

596 occupied by …
Two of the people who are present in Bari in US are missing in SH :

by a melancholic English officer who performed a part not then known as ‘disc-jockey’, providing the troops with the tunes it was thought they would like to hear; by a euphoric Scotch officer surrounded by books with which he hoped to inculcate a respect for English culture among those who could read that language

596 relabel tins of American rations
Such deceptions were practised by ultra-sensitive Soviet authorities at various times in their history. They need not have worried. There was no chance that receiving rations known to be American would have made capitalists out of the partisans. The wonder is that the Americans allowed them to do it; perhaps the alternative was no rations and starvation.

596 the destruction of Monte Cassino
Monte Cassino is the great sixth-century Benedictine monastery. It was situated on a great hill. Unfortunately it lay almost on the Gustav Line, the fortified defence line erected by the Germans. Unsuccessful attempts to capture the hill from January 1944 forced the allies to carpet-bomb the monastery, an act which led to immense destruction and the death of many people sheltering there though they had been warned by leaflets to leave. There is no evidence that, before the bombing took place, the Germans used the building as a vantage-point from which to fight the battle though the hill itself was well-fortified. After the bombing, however, the ruins became excellent defensive positions. The monastery was finally captured by Polish soldiers on 17th May 1944.
EW’s point is that such wanton destruction of a place renowned for holiness did nothing to secure the favour of God for the allied enterprise.

597 There was no biffing in Bari.
After this sentence a long passage in US is missing in SH. It deals with Guy’s wanderings in Bari and the accusation by a musician named Sir Almeric Griffiths that Guy has the death wish. It goes as follows :

Guy wandered as a tourist about the streets of the old town. He sat in the club and the hotel. He met old acquaintances and made new ones. Leisure, bonhomie, and futility had him in thrall.
After a brief absence Lieutenant Padfield reappeared in the company of a large and celebrated English composer whom UNRRA had mysteriously imported. On the Sunday they drove Guy out on the road south to visit the beehive dwellings where the descendants of Athenian colonists still lived their independent lives. Near by was a small, ancient town where an Italian family had set up an illicit restaurant. They did not deal in paper currency but accepted petrol, cigarettes, and medical supplies in exchange for dishes of fresh fish cooked with olive oil and white truffles and garlic.
The Lieutenant left his car in the piazza before the locked church. There were other service vehicles there, and when they reached the house on the water-front they found it full of English and Americans; among them Brigadier Cape and his homely hospital nurse.
‘I haven’t seen you,’ said the Brigadier, ‘and you haven’t seen me,’ but the nurse knew all about the musician, and after luncheon insisted on being introduced. They all walked together along the quay. Guy and the Brigadier a pace behind the other three. This place had been left untouched by the advancing and retreating armies. The inhabitants were taking their siestas. To seaward the calm Adriatic lapped against the old stones; in the harbour the boats lay motionless. Guy remarked, tritely enough, that the war seemed far away.
The Brigadier was in ruminative mood. He had eaten largely; other pleasures lay ahead. ‘War,’ he said. ‘When I was at Sandhurst no one talked about war. We learned about it, of course - a school subject like Latin or geography; something to write exam papers about. No bearing on life. I went into the army because I liked horses, and I’ve spent four years in and out of a stinking, noisy tank. Now I’ve got a couple of gongs and a game leg and all I want is quiet. Not peace, mind. There’s nothing wrong with war except the fighting. I don’t mind betting that after five years of peace we shall all look back on Bari as the best days of our life.’
Suddenly the musician turned and said: ‘Crouchback has the death wish.’
‘Have you?’ asked the Brigadier with a show of disapproval.
‘Have I?’ said Guy.
‘I recognized it the moment we met,’ said the musician. ‘I should not mention it now except that Padfield was so liberal with the wine.’
‘Death wish?’ said the Brigadier. ‘I don’t like the sound of that. Time we were off, Betty.’
He took the nurse’s arm and limped back towards the piazza. Guy saluted as Halberdiers did. The Lieutenant tipped his cap in a gesture that was part benediction, part a wave of farewell. The musician bowed to the nurse.
Then he turned towards the open sea and performed a little parody of himself conducting an orchestra, saying: ‘The death wish. The death wish. On a day like this.’

Two days later, when Guy reported, the Brigadier asked: ‘How’s the death wish today? There’s an aeroplane to take you into Croatia tonight. Joe will give you the details.’ Guy had made no preparations for this journey

597 I wish to die
It is difficult to comprehend why Guy should feel like this precisely at this stage. It can hardly be his boredom in Bari that has precipitated this desire. One has to consider, perhaps, that all his illusions about being a chivalrous Christian crusader and saving the world from infidels have disappeared; that he has married a woman he does not love who is bearing a child that is not his; and that he is about to embark on a mission which demands that he support a deeply antipathetic political system.

5

597 her first confession
a necessary preliminary to her entering the Catholic church

598 discernment of spirits
This is the term theologians give to the ability to judge the sources of the impulses of the soul. These sources may be good, or they may be bad. In Catholic moral theology, divine and angelic impulses prompt what is good, and human (in the sense of the flaws deriving from the consequences of the Fall of Man) and diabolic ones what is bad. Developing the gift of distinguishing between these good and bad impulses is traditionally the work of many years of spiritual study. Excellent confessors and spiritual guides are able, of course, to utilise their honed judgment in appraising the spiritual state of those they advise.
Uncle Peregrine does not consider the discernment of spirits to be one of his abilities and so cannot tell what impulses are influencing Virginia’s words and thoughts.

6

598 Begoy
This town does not exist. EW himself was stationed at a small spa town called Topusko, not far from the Bosnian border. It bears a considerable resemblance to Begoy.
EW’s reason for being in Croatia was that Randolph Churchill, the son of the Prime Minister and a friend, wanted him as a companion on his politically-inspired mission to Yugoslavia. He got EW to go with him by asking him to investigate the relations between the church of the majority Catholics of Croatia and the Orthodox, a request EW made his major task though converting it into a study of the relations between Catholics and Partisans since he had little opportunity for studying the Orthodox church.

598 Zagreb
then and now the capital city of Croatia

598 the priests said Mass
The Croatians were, and are, mainly Catholic.

599 Habsburg Empire
Until 1918 Croatia was ruled from Vienna by the Habsburgs, the Austrian Emperors. As a result, evidence of Viennese sophistication remained visible in many towns and cities of the country. On his walks through Begoy, Guy notices the remnants of Habsburg rule.
The Habsburgs were the ruling family of Austria from 1278 to 1918, the monarch being termed an archduke. From the fifteenth century the Archduke was invariably the Holy Roman Emperor and from 1804 the Emperor of Austria. Through purchase and marriage settlements and with the aid of the Turkish decline they built up a huge empire, including Croatia. This empire collapsed completely at the end of World War I into its more or less natural components.

599 ‘interpreter’ named Bakic
Though appointed as an interpreter, it is soon clear that Bakic’s role is to keep watch on Guy’s movements and report back to the partisan authorities on his activities. This character is based on EW’s real interpreter, a man named Stari, who had lived for some years in the United States and had picked up a New York mode of speech.

600 Guy’s duty was to transmit reports on the military situation.
The duty of Randolph Churchill and EW was to liaise between the British military in Italy and the partisans in the field. In the rest of this paragraph and the next EW sketches the duties very clearly and with some ironic delicacy.

600 Commissar
a senior Communist Party official with political and often military responsibility

601 Slivovic
Generally spelt slivovitz these days, this is a clear plum brandy.

602 Mostar … Fiume
Mostar is the most important city of Herzegovina. It achieved notoriety in the late twentieth century for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of its Moslem inhabitants, one-third of the city. The remaining Croats and Serbs live on opposite banks of the River Neretva.
Fiume was the Italian name for the city now known as Rijeka, from 1924 until 1945 ruled by Italy and then incorporated into Croatia. It is a sea-port on an inlet of the Adriatic Sea.

603 Rab
an island in the Adriatic about 70 km south of Rijeka

605 Tito’s forces at Dvrar had been dispersed
This had happened in June 1944 in the last major German offensive in Yugoslavia. Tito had had to be rescued and brought to Vis, one of the Adriatic islands that had been captured by the Royal Navy. EW actually met him here on 10th July.
This meeting was the setting for one of the more amusing encounters in EW’s life. EW had previously seized on the idea that Tito might be a woman. It was not his invention; the possibility had been discussed in Foreign Office circles much earlier - Sir Fitzroy Maclean mentions the speculation in his memoirs Eastern Approaches. But once he had got hold of the notion, EW played it for all it was worth with the result that Tito himself got to hear of his witticisms. Tito was bathing at Vis and displaying his obviously masculine attributes when EW turned up. Tito said to Maclean, ‘Please ask Captain Waugh why he thinks I am a woman.' Maclean says that EW did not answer but merely looked embarrassed and disconcerted. EW nevertheless continued the joke for the rest of his life, even endowing Tito with lesbian predilections.

605 U.N.R.R.A.
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. This organisation was in existence from 1943 to 1947 and had the aim of helping displaced and distressed people in the newly liberated countries.

607 blockbusters and pattern bombing
Blockbusters are huge bombs intended to destroy strongly-fortified buildings.
Pattern bombing was a technique used by the United States Air Force whereby all the bombers in an attacking force dropped their bombs simultaneously once they had reached the intended area, so ensuring that some at least of the targets were demolished. It was intended to provide a higher than average success rate. It certainly provided a higher than average death rate.

610 Query “bath”
Guy queries the word not because he does not understand what the message says, but because he intends to annoy the humourless jobsworth Gilpin.

7

610 An omen
Peregrine probably sees the child’s birth as an omen because it and the liberation of Rome together promise a brighter future for the world and the Crouchbacks in particular.

611 The idea had not occurred to me.
After this sentence EW cut out a delightful passage of conjecture by Peregrine which takes Box-Bender’s words seriously. It reads :

Awfully few of us have become priests in the last generation or two. In any case I should hardly live to see his election. Now you suggest it, though, it is a pleasant speculation - an Englishman and a Crouchback in the chair of Peter - just about at the turn of the century, I suppose.

We who lived at the turn of the century know that a Crouchback did not become Pope.

611 ‘Overlord’
The code-name for the invasion of Europe which took place on the beaches of Normandy in northern France on 6th June 1944.

612 gossip-writer
In US Kilbannock is called a racing correspondent (see my note to page 17.)

612 zeitgeist
the spirit of the times (German). This was an expression, much in favour in times of trial and tribulation, employed to express the complex of ideas current in modern thinking.

612 The way it grows.
General Whale’s comment seems offensive. But there may be some truth in it if Trimmer’s hair has not been well trained from infancy.

612 Monty
The nickname of General Bernard Montgomery, later Viscount Montgomery (1887-1976), the victor of El Alamein and the man charged with the conduct of the Allied invasion of northern France. He had a chirpy, popular manner which chimed rather oddly with his cautious, well-prepared approach to fighting war.

612-613 drive numerous Canadians to their death at Dieppe
This is a reference to the notorious raid of 19th August 1942. It was an attempt to find out if it were possible to capture Channel ports and then use them to land troops on a scale suitable for an invasion. The Germans, who were aware of strange preparations long before the raid happened, put up a fierce resistance and the major object could not be achieved. Only the Commandos operating in supporting operations intended to neutralise gun emplacements on the flanks were reasonably successful, but even they lost more men than they had anticipated. The Canadian brigade which formed the main attacking force lost more than half its men killed, wounded or captured. The Royal Air Force lost twice as many aircraft as did the Luftwaffe. All in all it was an utter disaster, but it showed that such a plan would not work for the major invasion itself.
The plan was not an operation by Combined Operations alone, of course, but a full military scheme worked out in co-operation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lord Louis Mountbatten was however the initiator of the plan. Despite Whale’s feeling that the usefulness of his department and himself is over, in reality the Commandos and other special forces were still to play important roles in the remainder of the war.

613 would not have recognized the authorship of this book.
EW cuts out a passage from US here in which he highlights how absurd and unreal Ludovic’s novel is :

It was a very gorgeous, almost gaudy, tale of romance and high drama set, as his experience with Sir Ralph Brompton well qualified him to set it, in the diplomatic society of the previous decade. The characters and their equipment were seen as Ludovic in his own ambiguous position had seen them, more brilliant than reality. The plot was Shakespearean in its elaborate improbability. The dialogue could never have issued from human lips, the scenes of passion were capable of bringing a blush to readers of either sex and every age.

613 half a dozen other English authors
Among these unspecified authors we must include EW himself. In this period (1944) he completed Brideshead Revisited, but by the time he wrote US he had come to dislike its prose style though it was his most popular book. He is therefore including it among those books which would turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination.

614 the heroine was the author
A passage is missing from US which gave details of this heroine :

Lady Marmaduke Transept (that was the name which Ludovic had recklessly bestowed on her) was Lord Marmaduke’s second wife. He was an ambassador. She was extravagantly beautiful, clever, doomed; passionless only towards Lord Marmaduke; ambitious for everything except his professional success. If the epithet could properly be used of anyone so splendidly caparisoned, Lady Marmaduke was a bitch. Ludovic had known from the start that she must die in the last chapter. He had made no plans. Often in the weeks of composition he had wondered, almost idly, what would be the end of her. He waited to see, as he might have sat in a seat at the theatre watching the antics of players over whom he had no control.

614 Lady Marmaduke’s death
Many critics have noted the resemblance of this death, and its centrality to the plot of The Death Wish, to that of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited.

615 Flying bombs
These are the V1 flightless aircraft, which began successful flights across the Channel on 13th June 1944, nine days and not ten after the birth of little Gervase. They were nicknamed doodlebugs and buzz bombs. Until March 29th 1945 more than 8,000 were launched against London, about 2,400 of them hitting the target area. The remainder caused damage to the country around London, of course, or were destroyed by the R.A.F.

616 ‘What’s it got to do with him?’
Indeed there were a number of men like Sir Ralph who could apparently get things done though they appeared to have no great official importance. Sir Ralph is largely based on the ex-diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson (1888-1968), whose diplomatic and cultural prestige secured him an entrée into many secret chambers.

616 like a beautiful and ineffectual angel
EW is quoting Matthew Arnold’s comment on the poet Shelley : In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’. Arnold liked the phrase so much, he used it twice.

617 the best thing for - for Gervase
So the small baby is removed from the apartment which will soon be demolished by a flying bomb.

8

617 English abandonment of their Serb allies
EW means the switch from supporting Mihailovic and the royalist forces to Tito and his Communist partisans. EW’s account of the process is accurate.

617 a single small act
Guy’s salvation is burgeoning. He recognises that small acts of personal charity are what make people truly human and ally them to the divine. But he has yet to admit his full personal guilt in the conduct of the war, however small that is in comparison with others’.

619 Frank de Souza
De Souza re-enters the story as Guy’s superior. In reality EW’s boss was Randolph Churchill; but Churchill does not appear in SH in any guise, and was certainly a very different person from Frank de Souza.

619 Praesidium
an executive committee. It turns out later to be the Croatian government in embryo.

619 American bomber crew …
In this paragraph EW implies that they have deliberately bailed out and lost their plane in order to get back to the United States. I have no idea whether this hazardous procedure was at all common.

620 Mrs Gamp
Sarah Gamp is the bibulous night nurse in Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit. She kept her gin in her tea-pot.

620 smoked salmon … lemon!
These items were virtually unprocurable in war-time England without some very special friends indeed.

621 it is not easy
Because of all the petrol and travelling restrictions in force in war-time.

621 the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride
We now realise that before he could move fully onto the next stage of his reclamation, Guy had to have his past failures and disappointments cleansed. Virginia, perhaps the origin of most of them, has also acted as an agent of healing.

622 a clenched fist
the Communist salute. De Souza is clearly a committed Communist.

622 sacring bell
the little hand-bells which announce the central rite of the Holy Mass, the changing of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ

623 ‘Facilius loqui latine.’
It is easier to speak Latin. In those days one could expect all Catholic priests to be able to hold at least a primitive conversation in Latin.

623 Hoc est pro Missa … Dominus tecum
The conversation in Latin runs likes this :

It is easier to speak Latin. This is for a Mass to be said. My wife is dead.
Her name? …
You are not a partisan?
I am an English soldier.
A Catholic?
Yes.
And your wife?
A Catholic too.
Tomorrow. At seven o’clock.
Thank you.
My thanks to you. The Lord be with you.

623 watering place
a spa, a place where people go to drink or bathe in the local water for reasons of health

9

624 Mortlake … Burton’s stucco tent
In the cemetery next to St Mary Magdalen’s, the Catholic church at Mortlake, is the grave of Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), the explorer and writer. As a reminder of the Moslem lands where his main interests lay, his widow had a stone memorial made for him which resembles a life-size desert tent. It is not stuccoed; it is made of marble. She also burned all his diaries and notes in a desperate attempt to present him to the world as a good, solid Victorian citizen.

624 Ian Kilbannock and his fellows
Since in US Kilbannock was a racing journalist, this phrase has been changed from ‘society gossip’ columns. Kilbannock did not qualify for Spruce’s patronage in US!

625 a rag
a practical joke, usually juvenile

625 Michael Arlen … Iris Storm
Arlen (1895-1956) was an extremely popular writer of the 1920’s and 1930’s. He was the son of an Armenian merchant who had fled Turkish persecution; his original name was Dikran Kouyoumdjian. His most celebrated novel The Green Hat (1924) dealt with the society that became known as the Bright Young People. Its witty and sophisticated style influenced novels which came after it, including the early ones of EW.
The novel’s heroine Iris Storm is one of many self-confident young ladies in the literature of the period who claim their right to live their lives as they see fit.

625 pour le sport
for sport (French). Young women in the 1920’s wished to dress in a fashion convenient for their interests, which had broadened remarkably since the beginning of the century.

625 Scott Fitzgerald
the American novelist (1896-1940). In his work he dissected the two sides of the American Dream, the vulgarity and the promise.
At this point in US Frankie suggests ‘Omar Khayyam?’ Spruce contents himself with a simple ‘No’ in answering this puerile supposition.

625 Aldous Huxley 1922 … Mrs Viveash
Mrs Viveash is a character in Huxley’s novel Antic Hay, which satirises the English intellectual establishment of the day. EW liked this novel; in a symposium on Aldous Huxley (London Magazine, August 1955) he wrote that it was frivolous and sentimental and perennially delightful.

625 Hemingway … Bret
Brett Lady Ashley appears in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). She is one of a number of shiftless expatriates living in France and Spain.

625 the type persisted - in books and in life
One can quite easily place EW’s own heroines in this line.

626 Wiseman Club
I have found out nothing about this club. It is clearly a Catholic one, and therefore certainly named after Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (1802-1865), the first Archbishop of Westminster.

626-627 Domenica … stockyard
This description could easily fit EW’s wife Laura, who was never happier than when dealing with her cows or the mangel-wurzels.

627 There’s a special providence in the fall of a bomb.
A variant of There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow (Shakespeare Hamlet, Act 5 scene 2).

627 she could be sure of heaven - eventually
On converting to Catholicism, Eloise has totally accepted the doctrines of the church. As a result of the then strict Catholic view that one’s state at the moment of death would decide one’s eternal future, Eloise seems to think that Virginia has been lucky in the lottery of death. She adds the word eventually because she thinks that Virginia will have to undergo a long period of purification in Purgatory before entering Heaven.

628 Ulysses
the great novel (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941). It is a long novel in itself - my copy is 720 pages long.

628 Hall Caine
Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853-1931) was an extremely popular writer in his own time whose work has since faded into obscurity.

628 Hugh Walpole emulating Henry James
Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) is another novelist whose works are now much less read, though his are better than Hall Caine’s. Perhaps Rogue Herries remains his most famous book.
Henry James (1843-1916) is of course the great American novelist, naturalised British, whose reputation is ever increasing.

628 Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893-1957) is now most famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories, but was equally eminent as a translator (of Dante’s Divine Comedy in particular) and writer of plays and theological books.

10

628 living in a cave in Bosnia
A number of British officers in the military mission to Yugoslavia did move around with the partisans and share their perils. William Deakin and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, leaders of the mission, themselves did so.

629 de facto, ad hoc
in fact, for the occasion (Latin tags often used in modern English)

629 duds ... London Serbs
These two men are the representatives of the royalist government based in London. De Souza now thinks of them as utterly powerless and dispensable.

629 he’s going to meet Winston
Tito met Churchill at Naples on 12th August 1944. By this date Churchill was long convinced that Tito rather than the royalists should be supplied with military help and was keen to increase British influence in a post-war Yugoslavia run by the Communists in order to counter-balance overwhelming Russian dominance.

630 Auchinleck
Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884-1981) was the general who had succeeded Wavell as commander in the Middle East in June 1941 and was then replaced in June 1942 by the successful General Alexander. In 1943 he became Commander-in-Chief in India, a post he retained until Indian Independence in 1947. His name is certainly Scottish (it is the name of James Boswell’s estate), but he himself was born in Northern Ireland.

631 you can’t expect the Commissar to distinguish, can you?
The extent of de Souza’s blind adherence to disgraceful standards of evidence and accusation condemns him utterly. It is testimony to the way in which Communism competely fills his life, thoughts and hopes. To him, all those who think differently from himself and the Partisans are obstacles and need to be eliminated or trampled into obedience. Guy is in danger of being included in that category.

631 a company of Croat nationalists
We are soon informed that they are not even Ustase but simply a type of home guard.

632 Two brigades ... a hundred men each
This is an example of the false accounting we have already noted Joe Cattermole presenting. No regular army would think one hundred men sufficient for a brigade; more than a thousand would be normal.

632 General Alexander
Harold Alexander, later Earl Alexander of Tunis (1891-1969), had been the commander-in-chief of the British forces in North Africa. It was under him that Montgomery won the El Alamein campaign. In 1944 he was commander of the armies in Italy.

633 Vin d’Honneur
EW himself occasionally used the direct English translation Wine of Honour as a humorous description. It is a kind of formal reception.

11

633 Ian Kilbannock ...
The first paragraph of this section in US is missing in SH. It gives details of Kilbannock’s preparations for arrival in Croatia :

Ian Kilbannock’s first day in Bari was similar to Guy’s. He was briefed by Joe Cattermole and Brigadier Cape. Nothing was said about the impending battle, much about the achievements of the partisans, the failure of Mihajlovic’s Cetnics, the inclusive, national character of the new government, and the personal qualities of Marshal Tito, who was at that moment in Capri awaiting the British Prime Minister.

633 made no comment other than
In US Ian’s comments are a little fuller :

I see this as a job that will take time. Impossible to send spot news. If it suits you, I shall just look about ...

634 Marchpole
At last we learn who this unknown major is. The three paragraphs beginning Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole are missing in US. In the course of them we learn that all the Colonel’s careful record-keeping about Guy is hidden in distant inaccessible storage, probably never to be inspected before routine destruction.

635 General Speit
In US this American officer is named General Spitz. I do not know why EW changed the name.

635 manikin
EW means a very short man.

635 Lieutenant Padfield was there.
In US the Loot is there with his conductor who, it was thought, might help the partisans with their concert.

636 they boarded the aeroplane
Another passage cut from US at this point is :

As the last glow of sunset faded they boarded the aeroplane in inverse order of seniority beginning with the Halberdier servant and ending after some lingering exchanges of politeness with General Spitz. A machine had been provided that was luxurious for these parts, fitted with seats as though for paying passengers in peace-time. Little lights glowed along the roof. The doors were shut. The lights went out. It was completely dark. What had once been windows were painted out. The roar of the engines imposed silence on the party. Ian, who had put himself next to Sneiffel, longed for a forbidden cigarette and tried to compose himself for sleep. It was far from his normal bedtime. He had worn the same shirt all day without a chance of changing. In the hot afternoon it had been damp with sweat. Now in the chill upper air it clung to him and set him shivering. It had not occurred to him to bring his greatcoat. It had been an unsatisfactory day. He had wandered about the streets of the old town with Lieutenant Padfield and Griffiths. They had lunched at the club and had been ordered to report at the airfield two hours before they were needed. He had not dined and saw no hope of doing so.

636 Ian heard the change of speed in the engines ... great door slammed in his mind.
EW and Randolph Churchill were in a plane crash on their first attempt to land in Yugoslavia in July 1944. Half the people in the plane were killed. They, however, survived and were hospitalised, first in Yugoslavia and then in Italy, but returned successfully two months later.

637 the croquet match in Alice in Wonderland
(1865) by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). The similarity is probably that there is continuous and unaccountable jerky movement. In Alice, the croquet mallets were flamingoes, the balls hedgehogs and the hoops living playing cards, none of them keen to participate in the game.

638 “he was a fine boy.”
In US another person, Sir Almeric Griffiths, is mentioned as having died in the crash :

‘And the civilian musician.’
‘Too bad.’

640 The woman flourished a syringe.
In real life EW himself had to fight off a Partisan nurse who intended to give him an anti-tetanus injection. (Earlier in the war, at the time of the Finno-Soviet War when British intervention was just possible, he had told one of his colleagues, John St John, that his worst nightmare was to be left lying wounded in the Finnish snow and to be eventually picked up by a Soviet medical team and bandaged by a female Red Army doctor. ‘Death would be preferable,’ he said.)

642 The former Minister of the Interior
This gentleman has served his purpose in holding a meaningless position until the Partisan-dominated Praesidium takes over.

642 Montenegrin
This brigadier comes from the small mountainous country of Montenegro, then part of the Federation of Yugoslavia. It remained part of the country until 2003, when Yugoslavia finally disappeared from the map.

643 No flannel or ormolu about him.
Flannel is flattering, deceptive talk. Ormolu is an alloy of copper and zinc used mainly in decorating furniture; Ritchie-Hook must consider it an unnecessary flourish.

643 teach your grandmother to suck eggs
i.e. unnecessarily to demonstrate something entirely redundant and perfectly well understood already. Ritchie-Hook has appraised the situation already.

643 all the summer kept secreted
EW’s point is that the Partisans were more concerned to preserve the arms and equipment which they had gained (mainly from the British) for their struggle to take over the country rather than for use against the Germans.

644 defensive line of Christendom against the Turk
For many hundreds of years, the powers of central and eastern Europe fought a defensive action to prevent the incursion of Islam into the continent. Until the seventeenth century it was generally an unsuccessful endeavour, and the Balkans were almost completely in Turkish hands. From 1685, however, a slow process of recovery ensued as areas began to detach themselves from the Ottoman Empire.
This fort must have been built after the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), when Austria gained land in Croatia, but before 1878, when Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and so rendered defence of their Croatian frontier unnecessary.

644 domobrans
This Serbo-Croat word has already been explained as meaning a type of Home Guard (page 631).

646 the precept of his musketry instructor
What follows are the instructions for Judging Distance, about which Guy had learned nearly five years before.
Though muskets have disappeared into history, the practice of small arms is still called musketry.

646 pet dwarf
Renaissance princes (and others well before and well afterwards) liked to have dwarves in their courts. They were sometimes the licensed fools, but frequently were just ornamental additions. Occasionally they were true friends.

646 Clausewitz
The German military scholar who has already been mentioned in my note to page 240.

647 ‘Fortress of Europe’
The German name for the defence which they hoped would keep out Allied invasions of the western coasts of Europe.

648 I don’t want to go home
EW cut out a sentence here which explained Dawkins’s own position : One thing for him; different for me that’s got a wife and kids and was twenty years younger.
Later in his speech Dawkins also says I don’t know how I’ll do about his gear. Ought to ship it back to the base. Maybe your orderly would lend a hand when they send to fetch us.

648 he wouldn’t want more
A whole paragraph was cut from US here :

The partisans dug a deep common grave for the bodies in the aeroplane. They, too, were anxious to do what was right and offered the services of the village priest but since little was known about the beliefs of any of the dead, except Sir Almeric Griffiths who, Lieutenant Padfield said, was of Wesleyan origin and sceptical temper, a firing-party and a bugler performed the last office.

648 The captains and the kings depart
De Souza, again in literary mood, quotes from Kipling’s great poem Recessional (see note to page 154). De Souza has certainly been partly instrumental in securing the exclusion of kings (i.e. the King of Yugoslavia) and replacing their rule with that of (a small part of) the proletariat.

649 idée fixe
an obsession in the mind

649 Tito has left Vis
This secretly planned and executed move convinced some of the British and Americans that they had given their trust to the wrong side, but there was nothing they could do about it. Tito had to leave, though, because he wanted to be with the Russians when their troops captured Belgrade (with the assistance of the Partisans), an event that happened on 29th September 1944. Then he could be sure of getting his Communist government into power and being free to deal with all those he wished to call enemies. Until his departure he had fooled the British (including Churchill) by promises of erecting a coalition government and aiding a western landing on the Adriatic coast, a move Churchill thought would counter-balance Russian influence in the country. Tito fulfilled neither commitment.

649 Bulgaria
Bulgaria changed sides and declared war on Germany on 5th September 1944, though this act did not stop the occupation of the country by Soviet forces and a consequent change of government.

649 “found their souls”
Churchill had earlier used this phrase to characterise the Serbian resistance led by Mihailovic. De Souza can therefore only be using the phrase ironically.

650 Moses ... bullrushes ... burning bush ... plagues of Egypt
The ancient Jewish pariarch, of course, led the Israelites out of Egypt to the borders of the promised land. As a baby he had been set afloat in a reed boat to escape automatic death as a male child and had been found and reared by an Egyptian princess (Exodus chapter 2); the Lord God spoke to him from the middle of a burning bush bidding him to go to the Pharoah of Egypt and ask him to release the Israelites (ibid chapter 3); and when the Pharoah refused to let them go the Lord sent seven plagues, each one worse than the last, to torment the Egyptians into obeying (ibid chapters 4-12).

650 Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen
The German Grimm brothers Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859) arranged many old folk tales into volumes collectively called Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812-1822).
The Dane Andersen (1805–1875) wrote a large number of stories which could be classified as fairy tales, though they were usually his own invention.

650 image of Moses
Guy is thinking of two statues of Moses in Rome. The first is part of the fountain in the Piazza San Bernardo; the second the one sculpted by Michelangelo for the tomb of Pope Julius II and now in the Church of San Pietro ad Vincula. Moses is portrayed in both as having horns, owing to a misunderstanding by Saint Jerome in his preparation of the Vulgate (Latin) Bible, a delightful detail that Christian artists have frequently followed. He thought that a particular Hebrew word meant horns rather than rays of light, so he had Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the skin of his face growing horns instead of shining with light (Exodus chapter 34 verse 29).

650 cuckold’s horns
Secular interpretation has attributed horns also to men who are betrayed by their wives.

650 no opening of the sea, no inundation of chariots
A reference to the flight of the Israelites from Egypt when the Lord created a passage through the Red Sea for them but allowed the waters to return and overwhelm the Egyptian pursuit (Exodus chapter 14).

653 Perhaps by saying that they are old and have no cause.
Guy knows that this reason would not be understood by anyone who did not have a moral structure in his life informed by religion.

654 persona grata
an acceptable person (Latin)

654 They will settle with them later
One of the processes considered necessary in Communist states (which contrary to Marxist ideology and expectation were erected in the most rural and backward economies of Europe) was to impose state planning on the agricultural sector. This generally, as in Yugoslavia, involved the destruction of the peasant economy and the need to deal with peasant revolts of greater or lesser severity.

655 bartering
This process involving the exchange of wanted goods of perceived equal value is a natural development in an era of great uncertainty.

655 Now the partisans have found new inhabitants for it.
The use by a new dictatorship of the methods and structures of the old was a common feature in eastern Europe at this period.

655-656 Even good men ... ‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’
In this little section we come to the moment of full truth, of confession for fully-understood sin. Guy has confessed his sins to priests on a number of occasions, but his real confession is here to Mme Kanyi. All the easy gestures he assumed in 1939 have crumbled away, and now he sees that his motivation for going to war was tainted.

656 Lika
an area of Croatia, now the county of Lika and Senj, which contains the mountain range of Velebit and part of the Adriatic coast

656 walls of Diocletian at Split
Split, the Adriatic port on the Dalmatian coast, was the home from 305 until his death in 316 of the Roman Emperor Diocletian after he had abdicated. In preparation for his retirement he had a vast palace built, which after its sack in 639 became the nucleus of the city that then developed. A considerable amount of the palace remains but is in ruins, including some of the thick, high walls.

656 Partisans had their shore batteries trained on her.
Churchill’s expectations that there would be both a British invasion of the Dalmatian coast and a presence in Yugoslavia have clearly been misplaced.

656 Dubrovnik
ancient city and port (once called Ragusa) at the southern end of the Dalmatian coast of Croatia

658 busy dispatching royalist officers
Tito gave the order that all arriving Yugoslav officers, such as these royalists, were to be immediately executed. A few escaped and brought the horrifying news to the west, only to receive a stony silence and carefully orchestrated denials.

658 Posillipo
The name also of a cape, this was originally a hilltop village overlooking Naples. Now it is really part of the city but still retains a breathtaking view and much greenery. A number of neo-classical buildings and a grotto give the area considerable interest.

658 the mistress of a British Liaison Officer
i.e. Guy himself!

659 American counter-revolutionary propaganda
i.e. the illustrated magazines Guy gave to Mme Kanyi

659 on the black list
No doubt this black list has been supplied to Gilpin by Tito’s men.

659 tried by a People’s Court
On taking power in Yugoslavia Tito conducted a vast purge in which thousands of people were executed, not all of them fascists or collaborators.