Books: A Class War

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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."