SAME AS IT EVER WAS:

Men at War: Volume One of The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Evelyn Waugh)

Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart. [...] He lived too close to Fascism in Italy to share the opposing enthusiasms of his countrymen. He saw it neither as a calamity nor as a rebirth; as a rough improvisation merely. He disliked the men who were edging themselves into power around him, but English denunciations sounded fatuous and dishonest and for the past three years he had given up his English newspapers. The German Nazis he knew to be mad and bad. Their participation dishonoured the cause of Spain, but the troubles of Bohemia, the year before, left him quite indifferent. When Prague fell, he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a
panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But 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. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

The Crouchback tendency: Sword of Honour enthralled millions of television viewers but it overlooked a profound truth about wars (Neal Ascherson, January 7, 2001, The Observer)

[G]uy Crouchback, is an English Catholic from an ancient recusant family, the archetype of a noble reactionary. The war makes sense to him just so long as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are together as the enemy. In a famous phrase, Waugh makes Crouchback say to himself: 'The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.'

But nothing stayed plain and undisguised. Hitler attacked Stalin; the Bolsheviks became our allies. For Guy, the war had become meaningless. As the years passed, justice and honour and moral standards went splash and then splash again into the scum. Last week, Channel 4 showed their two-part version of Sword of Honour. [...]

Terror, irony and moral compromise pursue the TV Crouchback through Crete, Egypt, London under the doodlebugs and Croatia under the partisans. There is a huge effort to achieve authenticity. And yet it is not the effort to get uniforms and weaponry and orderly-room furniture and cigarettes 'right' which is so convincing. There is something else sizzling away here - a 'wonder additive' which made so many viewers feel familiar with scenes dated decades before they were born.

And that, precisely, is what worries me. Sword of Honour is convincing - but for an ominous reason: Waugh's private myth about war's futility has become our public myth today. [...]

When Waugh wrote this trilogy, between 1951 and 1964, people loved the acerbity of his writing. But they found Crouchback and his views perverse. In those days, the thought that the Second World War might have been an error which left the world worse than it found it was almost unthinkable.

There had been frightful blunders such as Singapore, admitted the reader in the National Health spectacles. But to see it all as a mistake, you would have to be...well, either a fascist or a believer in something perfectly weird. For instance, a devout member of the old English Roman Catholic aristocracy. Down the narrow perspective of that particular telescope, through which the welfare of the Vatican mattered more than cutting Axis communications in the Balkans, things might well look different.

They did to fictional Guy Crouchback. He was in Egypt, recovering from his escape from Crete in an open boat, when he heard that atheist, Bolshevik Russia had suddenly become Britain's ally. '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 dishonour.'

It's not that eccentric view of the war which turns a vast TV audience into millions of Crouchbacks. Although half a century has passed, few people seriously believe that Britain should have saved its soul by letting Hitler and Stalin slug it out alone. Neither do they want to defeat 'the Modern Age'. But, like Guy Crouchback, twenty-first century Britain finds it hard to justify a war's means by its ends.

If smashing Hitler required abandoning innocent people to destruction, betraying your friends or helping murderers to seize power, then what became of justice and honour? This TV drama says: 'Yes, and all wars are like that: mad and pointless.' And it also suggests that there are only perpetrators and victims in war: no moral shades of grey.

It sounds hard, but it's soft. It amounts to pulling the curtains across the world we live in. Out there, though, wars will go on blazing up. All will be foul, and all will make men and women do things that violate their conscience. But some will be worth winning.

Though optimistic about the immediate future of the war on terror, one has to be pessimistic about the long term. There seem no chance that the Administration will be willing to buck opinion for the year after year that would be required to truly root out all of those governments that support or provide breeding grounds for Islamicist/pan-Arabist terrorism and there's only a remote possibility that we'll end the fifty year threat of North Korea. So while we're more than happy to get rid of Saddam, it does seem rather pointless if we're going to leave Syria, S. Lebanon, Libya, N. Korea, Cuba, and China in the hands of tyrannies that are equally bad.

On the other hand, one can take great comfort in knowing this is how things always work in the democracies. As Evelyn Waugh argued best, WWII--in leaving Communism in control of the territories that Nazism had just been driven from--was just as pointless. Far from destroying the Modern Age, we aided and abetted it. So, looking back and comparing ourselves, we may not be a serious people, but we're surely not much less serious than our grandparents. We got that goin' for us. And, of course, Islamicism and Asian Communism are no more capable of sustaining themselves than were Nazism and Soviet Communism, so they'll fall in the end. And if it will be bloodier, cost more, and sap more of the soul to merely contain them than to fight them, it will nonetheless "succeed". That too should be comforting...I guess...

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2003 8:13 AM