470
FRANK KERMODE
formerly, when duelling was going, but not gone, out; it put you illto
a position in which you were neither understood nor respected. "In
the next war, when we are quite democratic, I expect it will be quite
honorable for officers to leave their men behind." Ivor, in fact, at
once does so. At the end of the second volume,
Officers and Gentlemen,
Guy remembers that "hallucination" under the influence of which he
began the war-the belief that all henceforward was plain, and a man's
duty equally so. Now, "after less than two years' pilgrimage in a Holy
Land of illusion," he is back in the modern world of deceit and faith–
lessness, his own country dishonored by the Russian alliance; and only
an obscure personal honor to fight for.
At this point the new volume opens, and its first episode represents
the final degradation of England; the unconditional surrender. By
the King's order there was made a sword, not for an English crusader
but for Stalingrad; and the people stand in an enormous line to inspect
it where it is on show in Westminster Abbey, "hard by the shrine of
Edward the Confessor and the sacring place of the Kings of Eng–
land." All around Guy sees the total abasement and ugliness of
England at war-universal treachery, false heroes, crafty American
lootenants; his father's words, "quantitative judgments don't apply"
no longer appear to apply. But in a world where Corporal Ludovic's
pensees
succeed, and in which, torn by guilt, he writes a great mad
trashy novel called
The Death Wish;
where flying bombs hover over
London, and British officers work uselessly with atheist partisans
in
Yugoslavia--even in that world there are movements of grace, as
{
when Uncle Peregrine, without trying, brings Guy's errant wife to the
Faith. Guy's total disillusion is not despair; he had merely mis–
understood the way of a fallen world. Like Alastair Digby-Vane–
Trumpington in
Put out more Flags,
he had supposed that "danger
justified privilege," and that he could "accept hardships in recompense
for having been selfish and
lazy."
A Jewish displaced person corrects
him; the world is otherwise. In ,a word, it is Hooper's world (he was
the base officer-fellow in
Brideshead);
in another, it is a world of
derision in which the Faith survives precariously, though of course
it must triumph. This trilogy has nearly a thousand pages, all written
with that chaste precision with which Waugh catalogues truth and
enormity alike.
If
Apthorpe is the funniest thing, and the evacuation
of Crete the most splendidly sustained thing, there are nevertheless
a dozen features to be remembered as possible only to a writer of
very great talent. The autobiographical preliminaries in
The Ordeal
0/
Gilbert Pin/old
claim only a high competence; Waugh
is
in fact a
