A Class War

THE END OF THE BATTLE (319 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($4.50).

The most accomplished contemporary stylist in the English language--sometime satirist, religious romantic and biographer --is also a social historian of sorts. With The End of the Battle, Evelyn Waugh completes a trilogy of novels about a segment of Britain in World War II. Neither as bouncy as Men at Arms nor as dissonant as Officers and Gentlemen, the third of the three is a blues for a bygone time.

Britain in Waughtime is a top-drawer, old-school-tie kind of place; many of the characters belong to a St. James club called Bellamy's (that might be Boodle's), have nicknames such as Jumbo, Fido, Uncle and Chatty, and take it as a matter of course that one wangles the job one wants in the war effort. They are also mostly members of a regiment called the Halberdiers, whose training in the early days of the war and blooding in the Dakar expedition of 1940 are described in Men at Arms (TIME, Oct. 27. 1952).

Waugh's hero. Guy Crouchback, the square and serious scion of an old landed Catholic family, joined the Halberdiers with shining purpose and an oath on the sword of Roger of Waybroke, saintly crusader of the 12th century. To Guy, the Nazi-Communist pact had seemed to simplify things: "The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."

Both Guy's place and his personal battle grew increasingly ambiguous. The Halberdiers teemed with weird Waugh characters--from one-eyed, ruthless Brigadier Ritchie-Hook through Trimmer, an ex-hairdresser on the Aquitania. to the knowledgeable ass, Apthorpe, whose portable jakes provides Waugh with an outlet for numerous excursions into scatology. Hapless Guy inadvertently kills him at the end with the gift of a bottle of whisky when Apthorpe was suffering from fever.

Friends & Traitors. In Officers and Gentlemen the old Waugh savagery makes mincemeat of the Halberdiers. Trimmer, the cowardly leader of a commando raid that was organized for publicity purposes, is puffed into a phony hero and sent on a tour of factories to bolster civilian mo rale. Guy and a group of fellow commandos are sent on an operation in Crete, where three of them desert (including the commanding officer), and one Waugh original known as Ludovic murders two of his comrades-in-arms.

Most disheartening of all, the Russians become allies, and the enemy is no longer plain in view. The book ends with Guy's return home in a mood far removed from Roger of Waybroke. "The 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 traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor."

Beyond Duty. When Officers and Gentlemen was published in 1955, Waugh announced that he had changed his mind about the trilogy and would let the two books stand as a unit. He wrote a strange, apparently autobiographical account of a bout of hallucination and irrationality, titled The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (TIME, Aug. 12, 1957), and in 1960, he published the biography of Britain's late, literary Msgr. Ronald Knox. But the third book was only waiting. "He took the pile of manuscript, his unfinished novel, from the drawer and glanced through it," he wrote on the last page of Pinfold. "The story was still clear in his mind. He knew what had to be done."

What had to be done was to see Guy Crouchback through to a melancholy acceptance of the greying world in which the only crusades are private affairs and the only pilgrimages are within. "I don't think I'm much interested in victory now," Guy tells his father. "It doesn't seem to matter now who wins." What he really wants is to die--as, it appears, do many of the people in the book (one whole section is called "The Death Wish").

But instead, Guy bumbles through a war of irrelevances and frustrations and ends up married to an outdoors type from a good, landed Catholic family. Along the way, though, this decent Christian gentleman does two decent Christian things--gestures that Waugh seems to intend as his lighted candles for a naughty world. For one, Guy remarries his flighty exwife.

Virginia, simply because she is pregnant (by Trimmer). "Can you tell me any sane reason for doing this thing?" a friend asks him, and he answers: "I don't think I've ever in my life done a single positively unselfish action. Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as 'beyond the call of duty'; not the normal behavior of an officer and gentleman; something they'll laugh about in Bellamy's." His second excursion beyond call of duty is to make a nuisance of himself trying to rescue a handful of Jews from the Nazis and Communists in Yugoslavia.

Sharp Look. In his crisply written trilogy, Waugh seems to be turning back from the mannered romanticism of Brideshead Revisited. But this is not the exuberant young cynic of Decline and Fall, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust; sophistication has been supplanted by weary wisdom, not-so-innocent merriment by middle-aged melancholy. The upperclass war the trilogy chronicles--in bars and blackouts, billets and beds--will for many bear only a limited resemblance to any real war they knew or imagined. Its dialogue is so Britishly British that it is bound to set some New World teeth on edge. But however limited, it is a valid social documentation of an obsolete way of life and death--as well as a concerned Christian's sharp look at some of the motives that can make men welcome war.

"Is there any place that is free from evil?" cries a Jewish D.P. to Crouchback in Yugoslavia. "It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists 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 . . .

Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians--not very many perhaps--who felt this. Were there none in England?"

"God forgive me," says Guy. "I was one of them."

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