Sword of Honour Books in Order

The Sword of Honour books follow Guy Crouchback, last heir of an old English Catholic family, through the confusion of the Second World War. Across Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, Waugh turns his own military experience into a mixture of comedy, frustration and quiet moral reckoning.

When the trilogy opens Guy is living alone in Italy, nursing the failure of his marriage and feeling left behind by modern England. News of the Nazi-Soviet pact jolts him into believing that a clear evil has finally appeared and that the war will be his chance to recover honour, defend the faith and reconnect with his country's best traditions.

Getting into the Army proves harder than he hopes. Eventually he lands a commission in the fictional Royal Corps of Halberdiers, an unfashionable regiment proud of its long history. Much of Men at Arms is set in training camps and on half-formed expeditions, full of false alarms and comic side characters, from thunder-box obsessed Apthorpe to the maimed, fearless Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Guy's idea of a clean, chivalric war soon meets the reality of muddle and bureaucracy.

Officers and Gentlemen sends him to a new commando formation under his rival Tommy Blackhouse. Training on a bleak Scottish island is boisterous and boozy, but the tone darkens once the unit is thrown into the disastrous Crete campaign. Retreats, miscommunications and private acts of courage sit side by side, and friendships begun in mess halls have to survive panic on crowded beaches.

By Unconditional Surrender Guy is mostly in staff jobs in Britain, turning forty and watching alliances shift. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war and the arrival of American troops make his old sense of a simple crusade impossible to sustain. A final posting to Yugoslavia confronts him with guerrilla politics, anti-Catholic suspicion and the ugly ways good intentions can backfire.

Running through the trilogy is a tension between Guy's inherited code of honour and the impersonal world of modern warfare. Waugh is alert to petty snobberies and absurd officers, but he also takes seriously questions of loyalty, guilt and the possibility of grace. The books are as interested in private choices, failed marriages and quiet acts of charity as they are in battlefields.

Readers who come expecting nonstop combat instead find a long, richly peopled story about how one man tries, and often fails, to live out his beliefs inside a huge, indifferent machine. Read together, the three novels trace a journey from enthusiasm to disillusion and, finally, to a hard won, very tentative peace.