A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour

by David Cliffe

An Introduction to Section 3 : Unconditional Surrender
(known in the USA as The End of the Battle)

1. The Story and the Major Theme

With Unconditional Surrender (known in the United States as The End of the Battle) we come to the final novel of Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy. Though none of Guy Crouchback’s illusions remain, in the course of the book he becomes more and more fully aware of the utter bankruptcy of British (and western) morality. A war he entered in a state of exhilaration at the thought of Christendom’s great battle against the atheistic blocs of Europe ends with the fall of eastern Europe into the hands of a tyranny to be distinguished from the previous one, if at all, as being worse. More catastrophic still, the betrayal is connived at and encouraged by his own country, and Guy himself is required to act as a very minor agent in the process. He finally learns that all that can be maintained is private honour and all that should be attempted is private charity.

When the story resumes, Guy has had a very quiet period after his experiences in Crete. His age and an unjust reputation for unreliability now preclude him from leading men into action. He first spends his time training new troops, and then becomes a liaison officer at Hazardous Offensive Operations H.Q. It is the best his friend Tommy Blackhouse can do for him. In the meantime his rescuer Ludovic makes a literary career on the strength of his pensées, and his ex-wife Virginia is forced to travel the country with the manufactured hero Trimmer, in the course of which, though she detests the man, she becomes pregnant by him. After trying unsuccessfully to procure an abortion she is resigned to having the baby. When she hears that Guy has become a moderately wealthy man with the death of his father, who proves to have been wily in the management of his resources, she sets out to catch him again. He is fully aware of what she is doing and feels no reawakening of love for her, but believes that he can at least look after one helpless life in the unborn baby and decides to remarry her. Virginia converts to Catholicism and finds it a lightening, revivifying process; she also makes a good friend in Guy’s uncle Peregrine.

After training at a parachute centre which is commanded by Ludovic (though as he hides away from him, Guy does not know he is there) and suffering a bad sprain which incapacitates him, Guy is finally chosen - by an electronic personnel selector! - for special employment in Italy. This, by a strange requirement of security, is converted into a military mission to Yugoslavia. Once there he quickly realises that the whole thrust of British policy is now to support the communist guerrillas, the Partisans; the threat to the church and the non-communists is discounted because of specious promises of tolerance and freedom of speech and religion by the communist leaders, especially the cunning Tito. Guy has learned from his father that he must save his soul by undertaking acts of personal charity and not by putting his trust in all-embracing and ill-defined causes, and he devotes some time to attempting the repatriation to Italy of over a hundred displaced Jews. Every action of his is regarded as suspicious by the increasingly confident and victorious communist authorities. It is Madame Kanyi, one of these Jews, who finally tears the remaining scales from his eyes. She points out that there had been men in all countries who had gone to war as a way of salvaging honour and justifying their peacetime sloth and indifference. Even good men, she says, thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. Guy recognises that he was one of them.

While in Croatia Guy learns that Virginia and his uncle have been killed by a flying bomb, but that her son is being looked after by a family friend Eloise Plessington and her daughter Domenica. He finds that the news does not affect him greatly, less indeed than his concern for the Kanyis. Back in Italy, he learns that their association with him has resulted in their execution. The rest of the Jews have been rescued, but this success does not prevent him from feeling a sense of futility. His response is to retire to his country home after the war, marry Domenica Plessington, and raise his stepson, who has been named Gervase. His brother-in-law Arthur Box-Bender thinks things have turned out very conveniently for him.

This section of Sword of Honour is perhaps a more sombre read than the previous part and certainly has little of the uproarious humour which marked Men at Arms. The subject hardly lends itself to humorous treatment, though one finds examples of bitter irony in Waugh’s best vein.

By the end of Officers and Gentlemen, the second part, Guy had lost his illusion that Britain is fighting a war for Christian values from a height of unimpeachable moral superiority. But there is worse to come. In Unconditional Surrender he learns that Britain - not just some of the officers, but the whole thrust of war policy from the top - is positively aiding the creation of an atheistic, anti-religious, tyrannical bloc in eastern Europe. Historically strong areas of Christian belief and practice are being abandoned in a short-sighted commitment to the antipathetic aims of one ally. Catholic Poland - for whom Britain declared war on Nazi Germany - is handed over to the tender mercies of Stalinist Russia. Catholic Croatia is stripped of any defence against the humbug and murderer Tito, a jumped-up brigand. At the end of the war Guy feels (if he is at all like Waugh, his creator) that the war has just served to introduce and strengthen an even more powerful threat to peace, stability and Christian civilisation than even Nazi Germany had been.

Of course, Waugh’s views were not popular in Britain at the time either of the war or of the publication of the novel. In fact it was characteristic of only a few Conservatives in politics and of some of the Catholic press. The distinguished Catholic magazine The Tablet warned frequently throughout the war that Britain was disregarding the aims for which it was fighting in the first place. The Communist threat was real to its editor Douglas Woodruff, a friend of Waugh’s. Woodruff advocated that Britain should not consider the Soviets to be an ally even when Germany attacked Soviet Russia in July 1941. He was also clear that Tito was not to be trusted in Yugoslavia, where the partisan leader’s main aim was to crush his opposition rather than to defeat the Germans. Waugh saw this policy in operation at first hand when he was a member of Sir Fitzroy Maclean’s Military Mission to Yugoslavia from July 1944.

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2. Waugh, Crouchback and Croatia

Guy Crouchback has a quiet but useful war training soldiers from 1941 to 1944. It cannot be said that Evelyn Waugh led a quiet life at this time. He hoped to be appointed to command his own company, but though he had shown great promise in initial training in 1940, his natural irony and intelligence did not recommend him to his superiors; they knew he could see through their blunders and resented his promptness in commenting upon them. Moreover his experiences in Crete had made him sceptical about military matters in general. Lord Lovat, the Deputy Commander of the Special Service Brigade, stated that Waugh was adept at a veiled sarcasm of a very high order. Waugh gained the reputation not only of finding it impossible to get on with his peers and superiors but also of being a bad commander of soldiers. Some of his superiors feared that in combat his own men would shoot him in the back, though some of these soldiers themselves later scouted this opinion. Rather, they thought him odd and puzzling; ‘What’s old Wuff on about now?’ was their general response.

Waugh seemed to delight in behaving in an unmilitary manner at the most delicate moments. His friend Bob Laycock, who had protected him by finding peripheral posts for him, for example Liaison Officer and Intelligence Officer, told him that he was so unpopular as to be unemployable and moved the Commando to North Africa in summer 1943 without taking him. Waugh still hoped to join him there but Lord Lovat was so infuriated by his poor condition after a drinking bout (he said that Waugh was in shit order) that he took the opportunity to order him to do some basic training, an insult in itself and a move which would have delayed him a further two months and probably prevented his departure at all. Waugh tried to contest this order and was in effect sacked from the Special Service Brigade by the Commanding Officer, Brigadier Haydon, though the expression used was advised to leave for the Brigade’s good. He took the matter up with Lord Louis Mountbatten himself, but got nowhere.

So Waugh was posted to inactive soldiering with the Royal Horse Guards, the Blues. A further attempt to bring him into the Special Service failed because the war in North Africa was virtually won and he was not needed. To counteract his boredom he then decided to do a parachute course; he broke a leg on his second jump and was unable to proceed further. After this he decided to write his novel Brideshead Revisited, an endeavour which he achieved in 1944 by ruthlessly managing to get himself leave from the army for the time that he needed to complete it. It was in July 1944, after he had finished the novel, that the Prime Minister’s son Randolph Churchill, a friend from the thirties, asked him to accompany him on the military mission to Yugoslavia.

The mission, based at Bari in Italy, was headed by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and was consequently known as Macmis. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had commissioned Maclean to find out who was killing the most Germans and how they could be helped to kill more. Maclean himself had, in often dangerous circumstances, spent some months in Yugoslavia with Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav Communist and Partisan leader, and had come to the conclusion that the only real opposition to the Germans came from the Partisans. There can be little doubt that this was essentially true, though recent research has shown that the difference was more marginal than Maclean thought. In any case, Communist sympathisers in British intelligence agencies, especially the Yugoslav Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE), headquartered first in Cairo and later in Bari, engaged in falsification of evidence, misattributing or failing to acknowledge the efforts of royalist forces, and inflating the scale of Tito’s activities and the level of support his Partisans enjoyed. The result was that by the time Waugh and Randolph Churchill arrived in Bari Maclean had already advised London that Tito was the man to support; and consequently the royalist forces of Dragoljub Mihailovic had been abandoned. The Americans took longer to be convinced but eventually concurred.

Maclean wanted Waugh and Churchill to be his liaison with the partisan forces in Croatia. They were to report back on the military situation and supervise the airdrop of the military supplies the Partisans needed; they also had the thankless secondary task of promoting pro-British attitudes among the Communist partisans. Their first attempt to land at their base in the small spa town of Topusko was a disaster, the plane crashing and killing half the people on board. Both Waugh and Churchill were injured and had to be sent back to Italy. In September they managed to return safely.

Their jobs were essentially light and boring. They gained no trust from the comrades. As the partisans grew stronger and the Germans began to retreat so the communists felt they owed little to Britain and acted more and more independently and unilaterally until at last it became clear that the usefulness of the mission was at an end. Waugh found Churchill a blustering, unsatisfying companion who had to be controlled by irony and non-compliance; even the arrival in Topusko of two more British officers, including another friend, the Earl of Birkenhead, failed to improve the atmosphere. Waugh got himself transferred to Dubrovnik and away from Churchill. There he aroused the suspicions of the new Yugoslav authorities by interviewing Church leaders and clergy in an investigation of the state of the Croatian Catholic church and the threat to its existence posed by the Communist victory in Yugoslavia. Eventually they found his presence on their territory unacceptable and at the end of January 1945 demanded his recall.

Back in Italy Waugh compiled a report which stated that the church was in grave danger under Communist rule, and that freedom of worship, which Tito had guaranteed when his position was weak, was unlikely to survive long. History has long since vindicated his judgment. The Foreign Office in London read his report but found it unwelcome. The policy-makers felt that Britain could not intervene in the internal affairs of a foreign country, and that to expect a peaceful agreement between the Communist leadership and the Catholic church was unreasonable. Waugh secured an interview with Pope Pius XII in which he explained his conclusions, an act which in itself could have been construed as seditious conduct. When he arrived home Waugh got a Member of Parliament to ask a question in the House of Commons about the matter, but nothing came of it. He had therefore to accept he had done all he could, that his military career had fizzled out, and that he had now to turn his mind to the coming years of peace.

This unsatisfactory, unproductive period in Waugh’s life can be seen paralleled in the description of Guy Crouchback’s tour of duty in Croatia. The Partisans are suspicious, demanding, unyielding and obstructive, always aware of their political objectives and expecting to receive everything while giving nothing away. But Crouchback does find his soul in this period. Whereas Waugh was busy investigating the Croatian church, Guy fixes his attention on the plight of over a hundred Jews who have been shoved from place to place without, it seems, any hope of a definite destination. Though Guy does wander into churches, usually for Mass and once for confession, he does not prepare a report but merely notes the perilous situation in which the clergy are placed. With the Jews, however, he takes positive action, reporting their presence and keeping them in the eye of the authorities in Italy. This is one of the qualitative actions his father commends. It is an act of charity which only he can do. He has already accepted Virginia’s child as his own; and now he accepts the plight of the Jews as his responsibility. Though his friendship causes the death of the Kanyis, itself a comment on the frailty of human concerns, his intervention is decisive in getting the other hundred Jews away from Croatia.

Guy ends the war in the same downbeat manner as his creator did. The war against monstrous atheism and brutish values ends with half of Europe delivered into the hands of a more atheistic and barbarous conqueror still. Britain’s honour, once so bright in Guy’s mind, is now tarnished and irrecoverable. Self-righteous men such as the appalling Gilpin are now elected to rule over his much-changed country. Guy can only retreat into a rural peace which may possibly be maintained for some time against the barbarians who have now taken power. There he will do what he now knows he can do without taint - look after his little family and raise his stepson as if he were his son. And by doing this, he will protect the old Crouchback values so lovingly preserved and passed on by his father and extend them into the next generation.

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3. Unconditional Surrender and Sword of Honour

There are fewer changes in the text as a result of the recension than there are in the other two sections of Sword of Honour. One major but necessary decision was to leave out the Synopsis of Previous Volumes which headed Unconditional Surrender. Naturally, it is not needed in a one-volume edition of a trilogy. Readers who are curious about what it contained can read it here :

‘The enemy at last was in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.’
This was the belief of Guy Crouchback in 1939 when he heard the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. What follows is the story of his attempt to find his ‘place in that battle’.
He is 35 years old, rising 36, the only surviving son of his father, Gervase. For some years he has lived alone in Italy in the villa built by his grandfather. Of his brothers one was killed in the war, the other died insane. He had a sister Angela married to an MP, Arthur Box-Bender. The Crouchbacks are a family of old-established, west-country, Catholic gentry allied to most of the other historic recusant families of the country. One of them was martyred under Elizabeth I. Their estates have been sold. The family house, Broome, remains in their possession but is let to a convent. Gervase Crouchback lives in a small seaside hotel at Matchet. He has a bachelor brother, Peregrine, a notorious bore.
Guy married a wife named Virginia who quickly deserted him for a soldier, Tommy Blackhouse. At the time the story opens, she is in process of separation from a third husband, an American named Troy. For eight years she has lived in the world of rich, gay, cosmopolitan society. Guy has grown lonely and joyless. His Church does not allow him to seek a second wife. He sees the war as an opportunity to re-establish his interest in his fellow men and to serve them.
After many difficulties he is commissioned in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, an unfashionable regiment of infantry, proud of its achievements and peculiarities; he proves himself a reasonably efficient officer. In the Halberdiers he serves under Ritchie-Hook, a ferocious hero of the first war. Among his batch of officers in training are De Souza, a cynic, and Trimmer, a former hairdresser, whose probationary commission is speedily terminated.
Virginia has returned to England at the moment when many are leaving it. One evening on leave Guy attempts to make love to her in Claridge’s Hotel but is repulsed with mild ridicule.
He sails on the Dakar expedition, comes under official disapprobation for an escapade arranged by Ritchie-Hook and is indirectly responsible for the death of another officer, by the injudicious gift of a bottle of whisky when he is down with fever. All this time he has ludicrously aroused the suspicions of a secret department of counter-espionage presided over by Grace-Groundling-Marchpole. He returns to England, and becomes attached to the newly formed Commandos, one of which is commanded by Blackhouse. Here he makes friends with Ivor Clare, a dandy. ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, an ancient Halberdier, deeply versed in service lore, is also temporarily attached to the commando. Clare has a Corporal of Horse named Ludovic, a mysterious reservist recalled to the regiment, who keeps a volume of pensées. Ludovic rises to be Brigade Corporal Major. The commando, as part of ‘Hookforce’, sails to Egypt. Here a brigade-major is attached to them from the staff pool named ‘Fido’ Hound. Mrs Stitch, a beauty, is in Alexandria with her husband, who holds a cabinet appointment in the Middle East.
Hookforce - without Blackhouse, who has broken his leg - goes to Crete at the moment when the defence is falling. ‘Fido’ Hound and Ludovic severally desert and meet in a cave on the south coast where an irregular body of Spanish refugees have taken shelter. Nothing more is ever heard of Hound. It is to be supposed that Ludovic perpetrated or connived at his murder. Blackhouse’s commando is ordered to provide the rearguard for the disembarkation and surrender on the following morning. That night Clare deserts his troop and insinuates himself into the disembarkation. On the morning of the surrender Guy meets Ludovic on the beach. They join a small party escaping by boat. They suffer acutely from privation and exposure. Ludovic alone remains capable. The delirious sapper officer who was originally in command, disappears overboard during the night. It is to be supposed that Ludovic precipitated him. Finally they reach the African coast. Ludovic carries Guy ashore, and while he is half-conscious in hospital, is sent back to England to be decorated and commissioned. Ludovic believes that Guy knows the truth of the disappearance of ‘Fido’ Hound. He does know, and has the proof in the written orders to the rearguard, the full culpability of Clare’s desertion. Mrs Stitch, in order to save Clare’s reputation, gets Guy sent back to England by slow convoy to rejoin the Halberdier Depot.
Virginia meanwhile is in difficulties. Troy no longer remits her allowance. Trimmer is used by Lord Kilbannock, who is Press Officer in Hazardous Offensive Operations HQ, an organization which from small beginnings becomes one of the busiest departments of war, to carry out a raid for publicity purposes. He becomes a national hero and falls deeply in love with Virginia, whom he knew professionally, and with whom he had a brief affair in Glasgow. At Kilbannock’s instigation, in order to keep Trimmer in heart for his public appearances, Virginia falls into a prolonged and, to her, distasteful liaison with Trimmer.
As Guy, in the late autumn of 1941, rejoins his regiment he believes that the just cause of going to war has been forfeited in the Russian alliance. Personal honour alone remains.
‘The hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of Illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’

(Note that in the Synopsis Waugh spells Ivor’s surname as Clare instead of Claire as in the earlier books and as in Sword of Honour.)

The remaining major cuts and changes are :

1. Because of the absence of the Synopsis and the need to cover Guy’s years of service after Crete, there is a paragraph giving details of this time.
2. A couple of people Guy meets at Bari are left out.
3. The wandering musician Sir Almeric Griffiths is almost wholly removed, though he is mentioned as having died in the plane crash. He does not therefore accuse Guy of having a death wish.
4. Uncle Peregrine’s pleasant speculation about a Crouchback becoming pope is omitted.
5. Details of Ludovic’s novel The Death Wish are left out, as is some description of its leading character Lady Marmaduke Transept.
6. Ian Kilbannock’s arrival in Bari and flight to Croatia are shortened a little.
7. In Sword of Honour Waugh eliminated the two children Guy and Domenica have as the fruit of their marriage.