A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

by David Cliffe

Introduction to the Companion

From the time of its publication Sword of Honour has earned plaudits from many of its readers and critics. Cyril Connolly thought it the best novel in English to come out of World War II, a judgment with which Americans at least might wish to quarrel; but English critics have not been abashed and some have continued saying it into our own century. Certainly it is the last great statement by one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Sword of Honour occupied Evelyn Waugh for some ten years, from 1951 to 1961, though it had been in his mind for at least six years before that. It was published initially as three separate but linked novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961; known in the United States as The End of the Battle since a book with the preferred title already existed there). Waugh himself does not seem to have gauged its scope accurately enough, for at various times he thought there were to be as few as two and as many as five novels in the sequence. In the end he used areas of conflict in the Second World War where he had had personal experience, and gave up any attempt to describe campaigns where he had not been present. (So a proposed volume on Dunkirk was abandoned after he had done considerable research.)

This fact undoubtedly helps to account for the predominantly non-optimistic cast of the novel. I hesitate to use the word pessimistic since Waugh was not a man to let human modes of thought influence him greatly. He, like Guy Crouchback’s father, always tried to see the world sub specie aeternitatis, and the book ends with a small but whole-hearted act of charity which sets the whole novel on an even keel. Guy, like Waugh himself, has a disappointing war, in action for perhaps five days of it, and those five among the most ignominious in the history of the British Army. Waugh’s experience of the war therefore informs not just Guy’s actions but the whole mood of the novel : the British are discovered to be a rabble led by cowards, self-servers and hollow men. The aristocracy of arms turns out to be a riff-raff of sauve qui peut.

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In the late 1950’s and the 1960’s his publisher asked Waugh to prepare all his novels for re-publication in a Uniform Edition. This activity gave him the opportunity of modifying them, some more than others. Perhaps his biggest challenge in preparation for this edition was to make what he called a recension of the three novels of World War II, combining them into one volume. Sword of Honour appeared in 1965, just a few months before its author’s death at Easter 1966. He took the opportunity to tighten up the action a little and to develop the personality of his hero Guy Crouchback, who might otherwise have been judged immature for a man aged 36 at the outbreak of the war. He dropped a rather schoolboyish inclination to reverie in Guy and softened a pronounced tendency to misjudgment in military matters.

I was emboldened by the overwhelmingly kind and generous reception of my Companion to Brideshead Revisited to think of adding further novels by Evelyn Waugh to the website. I chose Sword of Honour because it is a book I have grown more and more to love, whereas his other novels I have liked immediately. When I first read the three constituent novels (this was before Waugh undertook the recension) I found them wayward and puzzling. Each re-reading has taken me more intimately into the strange but fascinating world of Guy Crouchback; and I now empathise fully with Guy in all three of his major phases : the empty coldness at the beginning of the sequence, the valorous and chivalric commitment as war commences and its gradual decline afterwards, and the dependence on individual charity and love at the end. It is glorious and comforting that Waugh, whose reputation was built upon a cold brilliance of irony and unforgiving farce, could end his career with an affirmation of personal faith and charity.

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Though I believe the whole novel hangs together very well and has a strong, central, developing theme, I have decided to treat it in the three parts with which it first greeted the public. The divisions are quite clearly discernible. Each third has its own climactic military action, its own comic figures, and its own mood, increasingly serious.

I have followed my usual custom regarding layout. I use only a few abbreviations. They are :

SH - Sword of Honour
MA - Men at Arms
OG - Officers and Gentlemen
US - Unconditional Surrender (The End of the Battle)
EW - Evelyn Waugh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to acknowledge my debt to the Penguin edition of the novel edited by Angus Calder. Mr Calder’s notes to the text have proved useful in checking my own researches, and I found his Introduction perceptive and admirable.

In October 2004 I bought a copy of Paul A. Doyle’s excellent guide A Reader’s Companion to the Novels and Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh. If I had seen it before I wrote this Companion, I might not have started it. It explains many of the obscurer references much in my manner, though as he deals with all the novels he cannot do so quite as extensively as I have done. His book is also aimed at the American market and so includes references that are not at all puzzling to the general British reader. I have been cheered to find that he agrees with many of my comments and pleased to see a few things explained that I did not know. I have not hesitated to adjust my site accordingly. I must of course acknowledge here my deep respect for and indebtedness to Mr Doyle’s book.

Since I first published this Companion on the internet in 2001, I have many times been contacted by appreciative readers who have been able to help me with additional information, and occasionally with corrections to faulty information that in my ignorance or uncertainty I had included. I regret to say that I have not kept a list of their names, so I shall not give any of them but merely say a huge THANK YOU to all of you.

I should always be grateful to receive comments, corrections and additions at my e-mail address :

Text © David Cliffe
“A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour” published on the Internet, 8th November 2001
Site Expanded, 2nd March & 3rd May 2002, 28th June 2003
Minor Additions, 2003-2007