Evelyn Waugh begins the first novel of the Sword of Honour trilogy, Men at Arms, with the story of Roger of Waybroke, a knight who sets out for the Crusades but dies along the way. Guy Crouchback volunteers for service in the Second World War with the desire to be a knight and to make a pure knightly quest, even a grail quest. Before setting out, he dedicates himself to this crusade on Sir Roger’s sword. The second volume, Officers and Gentlemen traces his growing disappointment in the face of the realities of war. The third volume, Unconditional Surrender, begins with the exhibition of another sword, the sword forged on the order of the King of England to be presented to Stalin as a salute to the defenders of Stalingrad. 

The alliance with Stalin represents for Guy (and for Waugh) a betrayal of the ideals for which England went to war. This betrayal, along with the incompetence, cowardice, and villainy that he finds around him, robs Guy of his desired purity of quest. Only personal knightly conduct remains to aspire to, but at 40, nobody is willing to give him a combat assignment. He languishes in unemployment and administrative trivia until he is given one last chance to prove himself a worthy knight. 

Waugh’s concern throughout the Sword of Honour trilogy is to show that Catholic morality does not consist in a slightly different set of prohibitions but in a vastly different set of priorities. When Guy speaks critically of the Lateran Treaty (which established Vatican City and pledged the papacy to political neutrality) as a political blunder, his father rebukes him.

Mr. Crouchback regarded his son sadly, “My dear boy,” he said. “You’re really talking the most terrible nonsense, you know. That isn’t at all what the Church is like. It isn’t what she’s for.”

Later, Mr. Crouchback writes to his son:

When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as the result of it? How many children have been brought up in the faith that might have lived in ignorance? Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face”.

This notion of the Church as something of a radically different kind of institution runs through the series and through Unconditional Surrender in particular. On the occasion of his father’s funeral, Guy reflects on the words of Psalm 111:7 (“The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy.”)

‘In memoria aeterna erit justus: ab auditione mala non timebit.’ The first phrase was apt. His father had been a ‘just man’; not particularly judicious, not at all judicial, but ‘just’ in the full sense of the psalmist. 

And in another place, he reflects on a verse of the Dies Irae (Guilty, now I pour my moaning,/ All my shame with anguish owning;/ Spare, O God, Thy suppliant groaning!)

“As the nuns sang Dies Irae with all its ancient deprecations of divine wrath, Guy knew that his father was joining his voice with theirs: 

Ingemisco, tamquam reus:

Culpa rubet vultus meus:

Supplicanti parce, Deus.

That would be his prayer, who saw, and had always seen, quite clearly the difference in kind between the goodness of the most innocent of humans and the blinding, ineffable goodness of God. ‘Quantitative judgments don’t apply,’ his father had written. As a reasoning man Mr. Crouchback had known that he was honorable, charitable, and faithful; a man by whom all the formularies of his faith should be confident of salvation; as a man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine notice. To Guy his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known.” 

Guy, however, fails to realize how this applies to his own case. He remains convinced that some knightly task will be required of him. 

In the recesses of Guy’s conscience there lay the belief that somewhere, somehow, something would be required of him; that he must be attentive to the summons when it came. They also served who only stood and waited. He saw himself as one of the laborers in the parable who sat in the market-place waiting to be hired and were not called into the vineyard until late in the day. They had their reward on equality with the men who had toiled since dawn. One day he would get the chance to do some small service which only he could perform, for which he had been created. Even he must have his function in the divine plan. He did not expect a heroic destiny. Quantitative judgements did not apply. All that mattered was to recognize the chance when it offered. Perhaps his father was at that moment clearing the way for him. ‘Show me what to do and help me to do it,’ he prayed. 

One such opportunity presents itself when his ex-wife, Virginia, comes to him broke, homeless, and with child by another man, conceived out of wedlock. He marries her again, though he knows full well that her character has not changed. When a friend expostulates with him for what she regards as a foolish act, he says:

“‘Of course Virginia is tough. She would have survived somehow. I shan’t be changing her by what I’m doing. I know all that. But you see there’s another -’ he was going to say ‘soul’; then realized that this word would mean little to Kerstie for all her granite propriety – ‘there’s another life to consider. What sort of life do you think her child would have, born unwanted in 1944?’

‘It’s no business of yours.’

‘It was made my business by being offered.’

‘My dear Guy, the world is full of unwanted children. Half the population of Europe are homeless – refugees and prisoners. What is one child more or less in all that misery?’

‘I can’t do anything about all those others. This is just one case where I can help. And only I, really. I was Virginia’s last resort. So I couldn’t do anything else. Don’t you see?’”

But this, seemingly, is not sufficient to fulfill Guy’s knightly ambitions. 

In this limbo Guy fretted for more than a week while February blossomed into March. He had left Italy four and a half years ago. He had then taken leave of the crusader whom the people called ‘il santo inglese’. He had laid his hand on the sword that had never struck the infidel. He wore the medal which had hung round the neck of his brother, Gervase, when the sniper had picked him off on his way up to the line in Flanders. In his heart he felt stirring the despair in which his brother, Ivo, had starved himself to death. Half an hour’s scramble on the beach at Dakar; an ignominious route in Crete. That had been his war. 

The motif of the soldier who never managed to get to the battle is here repeated in Sir Roger, in Gervase, and in Guy himself. In despair, Guy goes to confession.

“‘Father, I wish to die.’

‘Yes. How many times?’

‘Almost all the time.’

The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. ‘What was it you wished to do?’

‘To die.’

‘Yes. You have attempted suicide?’

‘No.’

‘Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?’

‘No, father; presumption. I am not fit to die.’

‘There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.’

After the Absolution he said, ‘Are you a foreigner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you spare a few cigarettes?’”

But Guy believes that he has at last found his knightly task when he discovers a group of displaced Jews while serving as a liaison officer to the partisans in Yugoslavia. Alas, all his efforts to aid them only make things worse as they bring the suspicion of the local partisan commissars on both himself and the Jews. 

Here Waugh returns to the theme of the betrayal in the alliance with communists. When an American General visits the partisans, from whom the partisans seek military supplies, they ask Guy to teach them an American song to honor the general. They are expecting the kind of official song that communist governments taught their soldiers to sing. 

“‘He want to know,’ explained Bakie, ‘English American anti-fascist songs. He wants words and music so the girls can learn them.’

‘I don’t know any,” said Guy. 

‘He wants to know what songs you teach your soldiers?’

‘We don’t teach them any. Sometimes they sing about drink, “Roll out the barrel” and “Show me the way to go home”.’

‘He says not those songs. We are having such songs also under the fascists. All stopped now. He says Commissar orders American songs to honour American general.’

‘American songs are all about love.’

‘He says love is not anti-fascist.’”

Religion, of course, is not anti-fascist either, and when Guy attends mass, the partisans send observers to make sure that the sermons are not politically incorrect. 

Sunday Mass was full of peasants. There was always a half-hour sermon that was unintelligible to Guy whose study of Serbo-Croat had made little progress. When the old priest climbed into the pulpit, Guy wandered outside and the partisan police pressed forward so as not to miss a word. When the liturgy was resumed Guy returned; they retired to the back shunning the mystery. 

At one point, Guy believes he has succeeded in finding a way for the Jews to escape:

It seemed to Guy, in the fanciful mood that his lonely state engendered, that he was playing an ancient, historic role as he went with Bakie to inform the Jews of their approaching exodus. He was Moses leading a people out of captivity. 

But the weather stops the aeroplanes sent for the Jews from landing. His quest is once again in vain. At last he comes to realize the vanity of his ambition as one of the Jews says to him:

“‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These commissars wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by the war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardship in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilage. I knew Italians — not very many perhaps — who felt this. Were there none in England?’

‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’”

It would be facile to call the Sword of Honour trilogy an anti-war novel. Any novel that portrays the suffering of war tends to have that label stuck on it. But as Mr. Crouchback would perhaps point out, that is beside the point. The subject of the novels is the desire for a great cause in which to serve as a means of justifying oneself and one’s existence. 

Waugh deftly separates the virtue of service or the willingness to serve from the desire that some occasion should present itself so that I might be justified by serving. That is, from the desire that an evil should occur so that I might be the instrument of avenging it, like a fireman hoping for a fire so that he may prove himself a hero by extinguishing it.  

It is by realizing the futility of his knightly ambitions that Guy is finally able to escape from the stasis that had gripped him since Virginia left him, and, Virginia having died in an air raid, marry again and begin to live a normal life. 

The Sword of Honor trilogy is one of the greatest works of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists. It needs no further praise from me to recommend it to the general reader. I do, though, want to commend it particularly to the Catholic reader not simply as a brilliant novel but also for the sophistication of its Catholic themes. Catholics will find great comfort in the account of Mr. Crouchback’s requiem mass and in the vision of the Church expressed in his letter to Guy where he writes: 

 ‘The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes or stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice … Quantitative judgements don’t apply.”

Qualitative judgements, however, do apply. In this case, they apply in spades. Everyone with an interest in Catholic literature should know and cherish the Sword of Honour trilogy.