Quantitative Judgments Don’t Apply

For years I have aspired to read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. But bound together the three novels (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle) make for a weighty volume. Where to find the time? Friends in North Carolina overcame my lassitude. Their book group took up Sword of Honour. Would I join them? I could in spirit, if not in person. So, I bought a copy and, transfixed, I read the 800 pages very nearly in a single sitting.

The bulk of Sword of Honour concerns military life. Waugh enlisted in 1939 at the outset of the war, and he served until its end in 1945. Like other novels about World War II, Sword of Honour depicts immobile bureaucracies, eccentric commanders, and the way in which so much energy is expended on pointless enterprises. Midway through the narrative, Waugh describes the chaotic retreat of British forces on the island of Crete after they fail to repulse the German invasion. Across these justly praised pages, Waugh captures the combat’s confusion and its atmosphere of soul-wearying futility. 

The military collapse on Crete enacts on the field of battle what Waugh wishes readers to see across the larger sweep of the novel. The main character is Guy Crouchback, scion of an old aristocratic Catholic family. Before the war’s outset, his marriage has failed, and he lives aimlessly on a family estate in Italy. The coming of war gives him purpose. In the fascist German and communist Soviet invasion of Poland, Guy sees the forces of godless modernity united against what remains of Christian civilization: “Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” The moral clarity of the clash enlivens Guy. He must join the fight!

Before returning to England to enlist, Guy visits a nearby tomb. It contains the remains of Roger of ­Waybrooke, an English knight who left Albion to join the Second Crusade. But God in his providence had other plans for Sir Roger. On his way to the Holy Land, he was shipwrecked and washed ashore on Italy’s coast. A local count took him into his service, promising to take him onward to the Holy Land after settling a local dispute. In the event, Sir Roger was killed in the skirmish, which is why he is buried in an obscure town in Italy.

It’s a brilliant literary device. The little story of Sir Roger, told in very short compass, foreshadows Guy Crouchback’s spiritual journey across many hundreds of pages. Like the medieval knight, Guy commits himself to the twentieth century’s crusade against latter-day infidels. But over the course of the trilogy this grand framework slowly collapses.

The modern war machine is indifferent to honor. Its bureaucracies are impersonal, its purposes inscrutable. Guy’s acquaintance, the aristocrat Ivor Claire, abandons his men as they are forced to surrender. Another friend, the well-connected journalist Ian Kilbannock, cynically adjusts himself to the demotic sensibilities that he rightly foresees will dominate society after the war ends. The noble show themselves to be corrupted, which is to say modern.

The most profound collapse is world-historical. Midway through the trilogy, Guy is in Cairo, recovering from his near death in the escape from Crete. He hears the news: Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. The godless communists are now allied with Great Britian. Waugh describes Guy’s state of mind, repeating the earlier formulation, but with a dark twist:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms.

Now that hallucination was dissolved . . ., 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 traitor and his country was led blundering into dishonor.

Waugh was writing after the war, so he knew that the Yalta Conference had conceded half of Europe to the Red Army. What, Waugh is asking, was the war other than a deadly spasm of flailing, self-destructive, and morally vacant forces of modernity, Allied as well as Axis, at odds with themselves?

The final military scenes in Sword of Honour take place in Yugoslavia, a military backwater where Tito’s communist partisans are more interested in settling scores with local rivals than in fighting the Germans. Guy does not die assaulting the castle of a petty noble’s rival, as did Roger of Waybrooke. (That role is played by Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, a reckless, one-eyed warrior as out of place in modern warfare as an armor-clad knight.) Instead, Guy suffers the full and final death of his illusions. The British intelligence agents at work in Yugoslavia are themselves members of the communist party, and Guy is but a pawn in a shapeless contest between men and causes impossible to distinguish in any morally meaningful way. Have the more than five long years of war come to nothing?

It is easy to dismiss Evelyn Waugh as a weary cynic whose Catholicism provided an escape hatch from a world he did not like. But Sword of Honour ends on a happy note, which Waugh frames theologically. 

In 1943, Guy is stationed in England. He visits his father, the figure of singular Christian virtue in the novel. Italy has just surrendered, and its king has fled. Guy responds with a peroration about the Church’s mistaken accommodation of modern Italian politics, from ­Garibaldi to Mussolini, who sealed the Lateran Treaty with the Church. His father rebukes him, saying that Guy misjudges the very purpose of the Church. 

The next day, he writes a letter to Guy, pointing out that the Church’s accommodation of false and even perverse political regimes may have borne pastoral fruit. “When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died in peace as a result of it? How many children may have been brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance?” Guy’s father continues with the most important line for interpreting Sword of Honour: “Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of ‘face.’”

 As I’ve noted, Guy’s marriage failed in the years before the war. By various twists of plot, in the war’s final year, his former wife, Virginia, is drawn back toward him. She is pregnant with another man’s child. Her efforts to procure an abortion fail. She knows that as a Catholic, Guy must acknowledge that she is still his wife. Seeing him as her only hope, she goes to Guy and offers to be again as a wife to him. Guy accepts, and they are remarried under civil law.

Guy’s friends titter. He is a cuckold, tying himself to a woman who will bear another man’s child. Truly, Guy has lost “face.” Yet events follow Guy’s father’s dictum. After Guy is sent to Yugoslavia, Virginia converts to Catholicism, and when a German rocket hits her London home she dies in a state of grace—one soul saved. 

The novel ends paradoxically. The conflict is over, and Guy regards the war as empty and without redeeming purpose. He has a jaundiced view of the future of English society. But before her death, Virginia had prudently sent her son away from London, so he did not die in the missile strike. Guy ends up marrying the young woman who had cared for the infant in Virginia’s stead. They live in a comfortable home on his family’s estate. In the final line of the novel, Guy’s brother-in-law rues that “things have turned out very conveniently for Guy.”

Guy Crouchback was awakened from his spiritual listlessness by the call of honor. He was not wrong to pledge to defend Christian civilization. But what seemed a clear path became dim and confusing. It’s not just the suffocating grip of modernity. Centuries ago, before mechanized warfare and modern ideology, Roger of Waybrooke was sidetracked, drawn into a petty local Italian conflict that claimed his life. The same can easily happen to us. We achieve little, perhaps nothing, of worldly consequence, or, worse, we’re deceived into loyalty to causes that betray us. “But quantitative judgments don’t apply.” Guy welcomes Virginia back into his arms. It is an act of charity. And that is enough, enough to provide the foundation for a life worth living.