How Waugh Ends the War

...His country "had been led blundering into dishonor" (by the Anglo-Soviet alliance...

...Once in England, where The End of the Battle takes up the story, Crouchback's melancholy settles and deepens...

...yet one cannot help suspecting that, to justify Crouchback's feeling of futility and waste, this is just what Waugh is forced to do...

...Crouchback realizes that she is at the end of her tether...

...For this reason, one ends the book feeling that, despite all the effort he expends on them and the self-sacrifice they demand of him, Crouchback's acts of charity could more properly be called acts of condescension...

...He drifts disconsolately from military office to military office, looking for work and failing to find it...

...The British mission to the Yugoslavs is riddled with Communists, there is little for Crouchback to do, and he dislikes the partisans intensely...

...So gross an impercipience about the leading character of the book seems to me far more damaging to it than Waugh's eccentric view of England, his snobbery, dogmatic Catholicism or "reactionary" politics...

...Crouchback, it seems, is able to feel charity only toward those who are so weak that they do not in any way threaten him...

...Later, Crouchback is posted to do liaison work with the Yugoslav partisans behind the German lines...

...even the comic passages, with one exception, seem to be infected with something of Crouchback's weariness and dissatisfaction...

...so again he is ready to be of service...

...Did it really consist of a few honest, deluded soldiers surrounded by crowds of traitors from the Foreign Office, the colleges of Oxford, the Labor party, and even from the regiment which the author has fictionalized as "the Halberdiers...

...But once again he has an opportunity to perform an unselfish action: He tries to help and protect a group of Jewish refugees, and succeeds in getting them sent to safety in Italy...

...As this partial summary of the book's events suggests, The End of the Battle is as episodic in structure as the two previous novels in the trilogy...

...Crouchback also learns that the group's leader, a woman whose dignity and decency had first roused his concern, had been arrested and murdered by the partisans before the Jews had been allowed to leave Yugoslavia...

...But toward those of his equals or superiors who have the misfortune to be ill-mannered or incompetent, toward anyone, in fact, who is able to offend or thwart him in any way, Crouchback is consistently ungenerous...

...The Jews are left to rot in their camp in Italy ("The Zionists are only interested in the young...

...Corresponding to his hero's mood, Waugh's writing was vivid and energetic...

...And I would be doing the book very much less than justice if I did not again emphasize how moving and how truthful is most of Waugh's account of one man's frustrated attempt to carry out one humanitarian deed in a continent gone mad...

...the serious passages, most notably the description of the rout of the British Army in Crete, were wider in scope and deeper in effect than anything he had previously accomplished...

...Yet the Jews whom Crouchback helped were not interested in the purity of his motives...

...he himself was on the point of being invalided back to England against his will...

...First, it is surely not true that "the Zionists" were interested only in "the young": They did what they could for all the Jewish refugees from Nazism, as any visitor to Israel can see for himself...

...so Crouchback extends to her his help...

...Second, though one may be certain that Communists and fellowtravelers were attracted to the British military mission to Tito, and made as much mischief as they could while they were on it, it is still difficult to know what to make of Waugh's picture of the mission...

...Even with its limitations and failures, The End of the Battle is the work of a distinguished writer...

...Reviewed by DAN JACOBSON A uthor, "Evidence of Love," "No Further West" The End of the Battle is the last, and least successful, volume of Evelyn Waugh's trilogy about the wartime adventures of Captain Guy Crouchback, a devout and aristocratic English Catholic...

...he was exhilarated by some of the dangers to which he was exposed...

...This would be a price worth paying if the author had succeeded in the central task he seems to have set himself in the book...

...But it does represent Waugh's most sustained attempt to get to the bottom of Crouchback's malaise of spirit...

...He believed the War to be a just one...

...The funny passages (and there were many of them) were as funny as any in his famous prewar satires...

...While he is laid up, his ex-wife, Virginia, whose desertion of him before the war had been the original, most devastating blow at his spiritual morale, comes to see him and tells him that she has been made pregnant by a hairdresser...

...in its own singular manner, it deals with experiences and problems which should be the concern of us all...

...But why Crouchback feels as he does remains, in the end, obscure to the reader—and even more obscure, perhaps, to his creator...

...Yet, after the loneliness and nullity he had known during the years of peace, Crouchback was presented in Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen as a man who felt that there was hope and purpose in his life once again...

...At the end of the second volume, however, Crouchback found himself "back after less than two years' pilgrimage in the old ambiguous world...

...he delighted in the traditions of his regiment and in the company of many of its officers...

...Nor can the reader fail to be moved by Crouchback's attempt to escape from it—in the earlier books by performing what he believes to be his duty to his country, in the latest simply by helping those around him who seem to need his help...

...For the sake of the child, and because he wants to perform "a positively unselfish action," he remarries her...

...Virginia is absolutely down and out...

...The suspicion that one might react in this way seems never to have crossed the author's mind...

...The Jews are quite alien to him, he can barely communicate with them...

...Virginia is converted to the Catholic faith...

...Two revealing examples come immediately to mind...

...He is told that he is too old for ordinary regimental soldiering, but eventually he is sent to a parachute training school, and is injured in his first jump...

...His father, whom he loves and admires, dies...

...And that, for Crouchback, is the end of the War...

...Nor is this the only fine episode in the book...

...To have succeeded, however, he would have had to detach himself in far greater measure than he ever does from Crouchback and his discontents...

...he had seen one of the officers he most admired betray his troops in the face of the enemy...

...One may feel that it is impossible to make the Europe of 1939-45 more hideous than it was...

...Even this action, though, is in a sense a wasted one...

...In the two earlier volumes, Crouchback suffered many personal mishaps and reverses, endured long periods of fatigue and boredom, and underwent the humiliations and dangers of the disastrous British defeat in the fighting on the island of Crete...

...As for Crouchback himself, there is one aspect of his character—and of his attempts to redeem himself from his own sense of near-despair —which the author has altogether failed to scrutinize...

...they were simply grateful that he should have helped and befriended them...

...That the discontent is genuine and deeply dismaying to the man afflicted with it, we cannot doubt...

...Inevitably, being so much occupied with the investigation of the hero's melancholy, the book itself is melancholy in tone...