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‘The enemy at last was plain in view,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh in the first pages of the Crouchback trilogy, (1) ‘huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ The call had come late but it had come very clear; and Guy Crouchback, devout, dim, well bred, unloved, a Roman Catholic whose faith had turned as sour on him as his useless middle life, set out in 1939 to offer his sword in the Crusade. At last, in the struggle against the massed forces of evil, his existence and his faith would have a meaning.

     For a time at least the issues continue equally plain. Guy is commissioned into the Halberdiers, an estimable and efficient corps officered by decent men of the middle class (and obviously owing much in its conception to Mr Waugh’s service with the Royal Marines). There is no room for doubt in the Mess of the Halberdiers, and even the very mixed bunch of temporary officers who are in training with Guy take on something of the steadiness and dignity prescribed by Halberdier tradition. But Men at Arms has not advanced far before another element obtrudes itself. Variously anarchic, mocking, treacherous, brutal or merely slapstick, this element is one which has always preoccupied Mr Waugh and which we may loosely call the ‘B-Factor’ (‘B’ for Basil). Like Mr Waugh’s immortal Basil Seal, from whom I derive the term, the B-Factor knows nothing of justice or guilt, of faiths or causes, of past precedent or future obligation: it may be compared to the demon of pantomime (for it is often convenient to personalize the B-Factor), who pops out of the ground unheralded to interfere, with equal relish, in small affairs or great, to heap prizes on men of straw and humiliation on the steadfast; and who, easily bored, disappears as suddenly as he came, so that for a while a rational pattern of action and dialogue may be resumed — until the trap-door in the stage releases him once more.

     In Men at Arms there are Basil-Incubi lurking in two men — in a distasteful junior officer called Trimmer and in Guy’s commander, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. In Trimmer’s case, the poltergeist lies dormant until the next volume. Ritchie-Hook, on the other hand, has an ungovernable appetite for violent mischief (‘biffing’) which is immediately and scandalously apparent. While he appears to Guy as heroic, he effectively confuses the simple dichotomy of right and wrong with which the book began; for this ‘stupendous warrior’, a pillar of the righteous beyond doubt, yet perpetrates irresponsible acts of extreme malice and so viciously ‘buffs’ Guy’s friend Apthorpe with a booby-trap that Apthorpe falls into a decline and dies. With all this, and with the chaos of summer 1940, it is not surprising that Guy the Crusader shows signs of faltering. However, he can still reflect, near the end of the book, that the two moral justifications for lawful war, ‘a just cause and the chance of victory’, are behind himself and his companions: the way to the Holy Land, while more devious than it had seemed, is still ostensible.

     But in the second volume, Officers and Gentlemen, the road descends into the Valley of Despair and there stops dead. Transferred from the worthy Halberdiers to a Commando Unit composed of officers and men from the smarter regiments, Guy at first persuades himself that he is serving with the flower of English chivalry and is again content. But the B-Factor, ever inimical to peace of mind, now re-emerges in characteristic style. The noxious Trimmer seduces Guy’s ex-wife and is acclaimed (bogusly) a hero. Russia becomes an ally and to Guy’s thinking dishonours the cause of England. A Catholic priest turns out to be an enemy agent. And then, worst of all, during a brilliant sequence which describes the fall of Crete, Guy’s friend Ivor Clare, whom he had seen as a true knight, deserts his men in the field. Guy himself is only rescued by a homosexual warrant officer (whom he suspects of murder) called Ludovic; and when he arrives back in Alexandria he finds nothing but equivocation, whether about the general conduct of the war or the particular and contemptible conduct of Clare. The book ends, as Mr Waugh himself remarks on the dust jacket, with Guy’s total deflation.

     At this stage two comments are called for. First, though I have read both these volumes several times, I have yet to find a single word out of place. Whether one considers syntax and style, or the wider technical issues of plotting, rhythm and construction, these books are as near faultless as it is possible for novels to be. Secondly, Mr Waugh’s understanding of military custom and practice, like his characterization, is immaculate: he does not miss the smallest nuance of behaviour, whether in the Mess, on the barrack square, or in the field itself. I should also say at once that on the strength of my brief acquaintance with the newly-published third volume I believe it to have all the excellence of its forerunners. It is only when we consider Mr Waugh’s theme that some people at least may have their doubts; and this leads us to the pertinent question — why, in any case, has Mr. Waugh written a third volume? ‘I thought at first that the story would run into three volumes,’ he writes on the dust jacket of Officers and Gentlemen: ‘I find that two will do the trick.’ But now we have — and I for one am very grateful to have — Unconditional Surrender, specifically sub-titled as ‘The Conclusion of Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen’. What prompted this change of mind?

     It is a question less of the mind, I think, than of the conscience. Officers and Gentlemen ends in despair: Unconditional Surrender, despite the implications of this title, brings Guy to reconciliation. In the face of world-wide evil, not to mention the multitudinous malignance of the Basil-Factor, it is binding on Guy Crouchback and his creator, as practising Roman Catholics, to rouse themselves from despair and find some sort of an answer. Since the Crusade has been reduced to chaos and disgrace, the communist forces of evil being now intermingled with the pilgrims, this answer must be individual and personal. For Guy it turns out to lie in acts of self-sacrifice and mercy.

     Others find different ways out. With all the panache and technical assurance of the first two volumes, we are told how the homosexual and godless Ludovic turns his back on an intolerable truth to become a romantic novelist, or how Ritchie-Hook, now worn out and disregarded, virtually commits suicide in a final orgy of heroic ‘biffing’. But for Guy there can now only be ‘some small service which only he could perform, for which he had been created’. He awaits the summons, which will not be the trumpet call of 1939 but the still, small prompting of the heart. And here again the perennial B-Factor plays its part. Having got Guy’s ex-wife pregnant by the atrocious Trimmer, the demon presents her to Guy — defeated, graceless, afraid. Guy pities her, re-marries her, knowingly has Trimmer’s child fathered on him: a ‘service which only he could perform’.

     But his full reconciliation has yet to come, and it comes in, of all places, Yugoslavia. In the midst of some vicious fun at the expense of the partisans (who embody the B-Factor in its most absurd and dangerous form), Mr Waugh discovers to Guy some displaced Jews. Despite the blatant hostility of the communists Guy does his best for them and eventually enables most of them to escape to Italy — but not before the futility of his pilgrimage, as he originally conceived it, is finally made plain to him:

‘It seems to me,’ [says a Jewess] ‘there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war . . .’

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

     Thus is Guy made to realize the true nature of the illusion which sent him so eagerly to arms in 1939. He has taken part, not in a Crusade, but in a meaningless holocaust which was the product of the death wish, of desperation, or even of mere boredom. Victory is also meaningless, because England is now aligned with allies as vile as the enemy it has conquered: what triumph there is goes to the B-Factor which has brought such corruption about. The only things that have meaning are private — his act of mercy toward the Jews and the self-sacrifice by which he sought to save his wife.

     Mr Waugh will cause offence, as he invites mockery, by so clearly equating evil not only with communism but also with religious apostacy and, in general, with all ‘enlightened’ trends. The plain fact remains that he finds salvation for his hero in two personal actions, neither of which need necessarily carry religious or doctrinaire import. Granted, for Guy Crouchback his actions do have religious significance, but they are also valid in the name of common decency and so they are valid for all of us. If unoriginal, this is surely unexceptionable. The first two volumes of this trilogy assert that honour has collapsed and that the traditional concepts underlying military practice are no longer viable. The third volume claims a limited but real victory for individual dignity, for the private face. But we must be wary. Ritchie-Hook may be dead, but Trimmer has only disappeared (believed to have jumped ship in South Africa). Trimmer could turn up on any day of the week, and even if he doesn’t the Basil-Incubi are always busy finding new and plausible hosts.