A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

by David Cliffe

A Note on Evelyn Waugh’s Preface to Sword of Honour

When Evelyn Waugh made his recension of Sword of Honour in 1964-65 he wrote a preface for the new volume. It makes somewhat sad reading today, as his disillusion with the path that his beloved church was taking comes over clearly.

Naturally he first explains his purpose in doing the recension. He admits that the three individual novels which make up the trilogy should be read together and are not easily regarded as separate works as he had originally stated they were to be. Readers of the three novels were of course aware of this fact already, and in the five years since the publication of Unconditional Surrender the whole trilogy had been discussed several times as if it were a united work.

Waugh states that he cut out repetitions and eliminated discrepancies which had occurred in the three novels. He also states that he removed passages which appeared to him tedious. In this Companion I identify the passages which are cut out. Very few of them, I feel, would appear tedious today. Indeed there are strong arguments for considering some of the excisions regrettable. Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, for example, seems a more strongly delineated individual when one reads about the game of Bingo over which he presides. I have therefore included the excisions in the Companion so that my readers may judge for themselves.

Secondly Waugh indicates that the complete novel is not intended as a description of the Second World War. Nevertheless, it captures marvellously the moods and activities of that period, alternately static and frenetic; and some of the descriptions - especially of Crete and Croatia - are masterpieces by any standard. To understand what happened in the evacuation from Crete you can quite as well read Sword of Honour as any history, and have the advantage of superadded literary quality. (I do not mean to disparage the historians; I was trained as one myself, or so I should like to think. Histories give us the detail and help us to make the considered judgments that we need in order to come to a balanced understanding of an event, or should do so.)

Waugh states that in Sword of Honour that he sought to show the war as seen and experienced by a single, uncharacteristic Englishman. Waugh makes Guy Crouchback a devout if barren Catholic exiled from his country and seeking a cause with which he can wholly identify and through which he can achieve both meaning in life and the salvation of his soul. In the course of the war he is disabused of this grandiose and foolish intention. He learns what his father has known all along : that it is not grand causes which matter in the final analysis, but individual acts of compassion and charity, however small. The war produces the precarious triumph of the west but only in conjunction with the overwhelmingly threatening new power of the barbarous Soviet Union. Guy’s great cause has merely led to a great danger. In such circumstances Guy learns the value of individual faith and action.

Waugh mentions three clowns who have prominent parts in the structure of the story, but not in its theme. One might think there are more than three characters who qualify to be called clowns. I choose Apthorpe, Ritchie-Hook and Ludovic. It is by these men that we judge Crouchback’s growing maturity. First there is Apthorpe, who acts like a counterbalancing double, triumphant when Guy fails and fading as Guy revives. Then there is Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, a man for whom there could in reality be little convenient room in a military structure. He is bound always to be a maverick, but his ingenious and active nature is something which Guy can admire. As Ritchie-Hook crumbles into insignificance and ridicule, so we see Guy’s illusions dropping away. Finally there is Ludovic, a competent and contempt-filled non-commissioned officer, who admires Guy and saves his life but whose nature displays a singular sense of self-preservation that results in murder, isolation and the lonely life of the literary mind. Against these three we can judge the everyday, normal, sensible nature of Guy’s personality and judge how far faith and compassion can add a profound significance to a human life. When he too seeks seclusion at the end of the novel we know it is not an overwrought, hysterical act like Ludovic’s but a justified response to a world that has grown cold, rational and cruel around him.

Finally Waugh writes in his Preface that in the novel he has, unawares, written an obituary of the Catholic Church as he had known it. His fear was that the Second Vatican Council (and some of the prescriptions ordained before the Council met) had changed the whole nature and purpose of the outward observances of the faith. The Holy Mass was now celebrated in the vernacular. Many other services had been either abandoned or altered. The mystical tenor of the church had been downgraded to create a more popular atmosphere. As Waugh puts it, there was a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent. There is no doubt that the changes, against which he fought as hard and as long as he could, knocked the stuffing out of him. He could see no beauty or grace in the new liturgies. Church-going became merely a duty for him; and where he had once found joy and meaning he now found heartache and distress. He says specifically that Sword of Honour was not a religious book, but that it had now become a document of the Catholic usage of his youth. It is a melancholy thought that he possibly considered that the book’s most valuable effect would be to remind later generations of the beauty and devotion of Catholic practice in the first half of the twentieth century and make them aware of what they had lost.