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The End of the Battle

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As the final and easily the best volume in Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy, this book manages to stay light and amusing while dealing with the greatest taboo subject of twentieth century literature: man's relationship with God. Waugh handles the weighty topic with the same dexterity with which he treats all of his subjects, never bogging down and keeping the reader laughing. The story also provides interesting historical material on both WWII and the disappearance of the English aristocracy. I would recommend reading Men at Arms and Officers & Gentlemen, the first two volumes of the trilogy, to be able to follow the story and the significance of the events.

The final volume in Evelyn Waugh's "Sword Of Honour" trilogy brings us to the end of World War II, as Guy Crouchback's quest to find glory on the battlefield has sputtered out. When we meet him in this volume, he is more of a shell than ever, his psyche ripped apart by the terrible fighting he witnessed on Crete. Will he find one last shot at redemption, of ending his own private war in victory rather than defeat?

"End Of The Battle" is the most problematic of Waugh's trilogy. The humor found in the preceding volumes is nearly gone. Key characters are snuffed out without warning. Waugh is bluntly straightforward about what he sees as the chief failing of his own country in war, a failing he saw carried over into the time he wrote this in 1960-61: The lapse of British will in the face of leftist challenge and Soviet domination.

There's no way I'd recommend any reader to this book without first getting his or her hands on "Men At Arms" or "Officers And Gentlemen," if not both. "End Of The Battle" assumes a reader is familiar with the concepts Waugh spent those last two books espousing, the cause of Catholic exceptionalism in the face of mundanity and evil, the slow strangulation of martial spirit by bureaucratic "banf," Guy's inability to have children. If you don't care about this stuff going in, Waugh is not going to do much to sell you. He already laid the groundwork in the earlier volumes; "End Of The Battle" is concerned with resolution.

There's many Waugh bete noirs in evidence, some which will no doubt bother many modern readers. Communists and leftists are practically interchangable, and there's a "velvet mafia" at work, too, homosexuals who toil to undercut democracy and serve Uncle Joe Stalin. Even if this was not at odds with history (the Burgess spy ring members were nearly all gay), Waugh presses his point with unsettling belligerence.

What's to be said for a comic novel whose most comic sequence involves a woman's fruitless search for an abortion? Actually, quite a lot. The comedy in "End Of The Battle" may be largely mirthless, but it is sharp and biting, too. The characterizations of Guy, his father, uncle Peregrine, and Guy's former wife Virginia are layered and involving. Waugh moves his story in unexpected directions, and as he does so, brings the themes and concerns of his trilogy into focus and resolution that, while not always satisfying, have integrity.

"End Of The Battle" reminds me a lot of the Hemingway novel "A Farewell To Arms," with the same pathetic tone and the prevailing sense of war's wastefulness even behind the lines. It's a very lived-in book. It also makes for an arresting conclusion to Waugh's last major work of fiction, the "Sword Of Honour" trilogy, as a kind of existential if not nihilistic book that nevertheless manages to be profoundly spiritual in its focus. At one point, Guy's father explains that winning or losing great conflicts matters less than the salvation of a single soul, and it is this Waugh means for the reader to carry away.

Does Waugh do this? A lot depends on your mindset going in, on your ability to go with the often-nasty twists and turns Waugh puts his characters through, and whether you've done your homework reading the previous volumes. Waugh the cynic makes a good case in the end for the presence of grace in this world, but perhaps a better one for how difficult such grace is to achieve.

The acclaimed Sword of Honor trilogy concludes in this somber, but still hopeful story of the closing days of WWII in Europe. The protagonist, no-longer-youthful British officer Guy Crouchback, is assigned as liaison to a group of Yugoslav partisans, and finds himself involved in the plight of a group of desperate Jewish refugees. On the Home Front, Guy re-unites with his ex-wife Virginia (for whom he still has strong feelings) but can she provide him with a hoped-for heir, or will she die like the character in Ludovic's novel, forcing Guy to seek love and happiness elsewhere?

Early in the book, Guy's father admonishes that "if only one soul is saved, that is full compensation" and this seems to be the real point of the author's story, and ultimately of the entire trilogy: after all the nonsense, the foolishness, the failures, and even the horror, just one single act of mercy can be enough to account for a wasted life. This hope for a final justification lends an optimistic tone to a book that is otherwise filled with the death and destruction of the bombing of London, but it also ties together the various themes that the trilogy has focused on: the senselessness of war, the relevance (or irrelevance) of Catholicism, and the manifest follies and inequities of modern Britain and Western culture generally. If the first two volumes of this series seemed a little too light and pointless, this book is where it all really pays off. A strong statement about how one man makes sense of an increasingly senseless world.

In the prologue of THE END OF THE BATTLE, protagonist Guy Crouchback receives a letter from his eminently decent father, who expresses concern over Guy's exhilarated reaction to wartime political change in Italy. In his letter, Father Crouchback observes: "Quantitative judgments don't apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of face."

Father Crouchback's pronouncement about ego-less behavior strikes a responsive cord in Guy, who subsequently wonders how he can justify his futile soldiering during World War II. Since the "just cause of going to war" was "forfeited by the Russian alliance," Guy now feels that "personal honor alone remains." In THE END OF THE BATTLE, the story Waugh explores is: Will Guy find an opportunity to perform a honorable and decent act during the war?

When Waugh's focus is on Guy and his dilemma, I found THE END OF THE BATTLE to be a first-rate book. Acting as the perfect context for this dilemma is Guy's military service in Yugoslavia, where the political situation is pernicious and opaque and the Brits and Captain Crouchback are supporting the totalitarian partisans. In this assignment, Guy's efforts to behave decently and aid displaced Jews reveal his full poignant futility and his civilized but inadvertent deadliness. When exploring Guy's limits, Waugh is terrific.

Even so, I'd say THE END OF THE BATTLE is a less satisfying book than its predecessors in the SWORD OF HONOR trilogy. IMHO, there are two reasons for this slight decline. First, Waugh writes too much about the English literary scene, which he treats with comic condescension. Second, Waugh is highly sensitive to the presence and effects of left-leaning British intelligence operatives in the war effort. This gives his story a dated cold-war flavor. Anyway, when these are his themes, Waugh seems more fleering and topical than he is literary. This detracts.

Final note: THE END OF THE BATTLE overlaps surprisingly with two antic novels set in World War II. At the parachute school, Waugh's character Ludovic shows the same crazy avoidance patterns as Major Major Major Major in Catch-22. And, his Nazi rocket attacks on London and the dirty tricks facility of HOO HQ certainly surfaced my memories of Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Just wasn't ready, I guess, to find affinities between the snobbish and traditional Waugh and the risk-taking Heller and Pynchon.

THE END OF THE BATTLE is the final novel in Evelyn Waugh's World War II trilogy, "The Sword of Honour." It is an excellent novel, and it is a fitting conclusion to an excellent trilogy. Some have lauded the trilogy as the best fiction in English to come out of World War II. As good as it is, I would not so characterize it, in part because there is very little actual combat in the three novels. (In THE END OF THE BATTLE there are three pages of combat.) The subjects, instead, are the ordinariness, pettiness, and inanity that permeates so much of bureaucratic military life; the dislocation (and death) brought about by the war on the home front; and, most memorably, the changes wrought by the war and modern times on English society.

The protagonist of the novels is Guy Crouchback (who turns 40 in THE END OF THE BATTLE), a thoroughly decent, admirable, and likeable man -- in fact, off hand I can't think of a more decent and admirable protagonist in modern fiction. Guy, as well as his father Gervase and his uncle Peregrine, are representatives of the old order in Great Britain. They are deeply engrained with family and tradition and, above all, faith and honor. But all three must gradually come to grips with the recognition that in the society at large those values are withering. Waugh leaves it to Peregrine to voice his judgment: Peregrine had never married (because he was a younger son, and younger sons simply did not marry in an old-fashioned family like the Crouchbacks), and he had taken to spending Christmas with distant relatives; as his visit in 1943 came to an end, his host remarked to him, "You're really the only link with Christmas as it used to be. It is so sweet of you coming so faithfully. Do you think things will ever be normal again?", and Peregrine Crouchback answers, "Oh, no. Never again."

"The End of the Battle" is the title given to the novel in the United States. In Britain, and as originally published, it is called "Unconditional Surrender." (If anyone knows why it was given a different title in the U.S., I would appreciate learning the reason.) I sense that the original title is more appropriate, because by the end of the novel, and the end of the trilogy, Guy Crouchback seemingly has surrendered, or at least resigned himself, to a new world order.

Among the developments of WWII that greatly disturb Guy Crouchback -- as well as, surely, Evelyn Waugh -- is the alliance with the Soviet Union and atheistic communism. In THE END OF THE BATTLE, Guy serves as a military liaison officer with partisan fighters in Croatia, and he is upset that politics influenced, even overrode, military considerations, and that consequently British actions helped pave the way for Tito and the Communists to entrench themselves in Yugoslavia. He also is upset that Britain and the U.S. abandoned so much of eastern Europe to Stalin and the Soviet Union at Tehran and Yalta. On a larger scale, those developments represent a different sort of "unconditional surrender."

In the face of an overwhelming world war and momentous changes in the principles that govern everyday life at home in Britain, Guy, aided by advice from his father, finds meaning in helping others. "[H]ere again, in a world of hate and waste, [Guy] was being offered the chance of doing a single small act to redeem the times," and twice in the novel, in a very touching and honorable way, Guy accepts that offer.

As with the two previous volumes of the trilogy -- "Men at Arms" and "Officers and Gentlemen" -- the writing is superb. Simply put, Evelyn Waugh was a master of English prose, and the "Sword of Honour" trilogy probably represents the pinnacle of his craft. He also was a consummate humorist, and that skill also is very much in evidence in THE END OF THE BATTLE, although (except for a few farcical scenes) the humor is drier and more restrained than it was in "Officers and Gentlemen." All in all, THE END OF THE BATTLE is closer in tone to the first volume, "Men at Arms," and the characters are more fully drawn than they were in "Officers and Gentlemen" and there is more philosophy or reflection about life. In my judgment, THE END OF THE BATTLE is the best of the three.

But to fully appreciate it, one should first read, in order, the two predecessor volumes. And one should read them as they were originally published. In 1965, Waugh revised the three novels and they were published together, under the title "The Sword of Honour." I have not read that later edition, but I have read about some of the changes Waugh made in the revision process, and in my opinion they were for the poorer. On the whole, though, the trilogy is one of the best works of fiction to come out of Britain in the last half of the 20th Century, and Guy Crouchback is one of the most honorable fictional characters.

I have been reading Evelyn Waugh since high school - too long ago to admit to the year. I enjoy his black humor and his subjects and his writing. Some stories have been better than others but I am glad to have finally found this one as it wraps up some loose ends.

I have now completed the Evelyn Waugh trilogy of World War II and I must say that "Men at Arms", "Officers and Gentlemen", and "The End of the Battle" were an interesting experience. The books were very good in the same sense that Evelyn Waugh's writing skills are very good. However, the subjest is World War II and, in that context, Evelyn Waugh is no James Jones (which is a statement I'm sure the late James Jones would agree with). I'm not sure I was able to enjoy Waugh's writing quite as much given the subject and his treatment of it. I confess that I did not come to this conclusion until I finished "The End of the Battle" but I also admit that I was gathering doubts while reading the first two books.

What Waugh's trilogy comes across as is a mildly satirical, upper-class, socialistic examination of the effects of a mainland power struggle. In the process, we get an enjoyable spoof of military buearocracy, marvelously eccentric characters that only the English can produce, and a tinge of tragedy through the eyes of a man who timidly stuck his neck out because it was the right thing to do. What we miss is the defining event of the 20th Century.

I will agree that Waugh throws some helpful perspectives into focus such as the randomness of death, the quality of courage, and the strange bedfellows that often unite in such global common causes. However, one gets the sense that all this is only as important as being properly dressed for dinner. Is that the satire that I'm too dense to appreciate? If so, let this review be my public self-humiliation. I, for one, prefer, for this subject, the down to earth analysis of the common soldier of WWII as presented in James Jones trilogy "From Here to Eternity", "The Thin Red Line" and "Whistle". Waugh's book made me realize that there was an element in England, as well as other countries at the time, for whom WWII was exercise in power from whatever perspective you saw it. For some it was probably what you deservedly got for failing to support the Republican forces in Spain. Oh well, most of us still can't figure out how England voted Churchill out of office before the war was over.

I will continue to read Waugh because he truly is a gifted writer. However, I prefer "Scoop" and its' fictional African setting to this trilogy and its' trivialization of the defeat of tyranny.