PROLOGUE

Lovat's trivial triumph over Waugh is quickly dispatched in the Prologue to Unconditional Surrender, where Waugh contrives a nod to his own degrading rejection in Guy's comparable discomfiture. In 1941 ‘A draft of reinforcements was sent out’ to Ritchie-Hook's battalion, biffing its way across North Africa, but ‘Guy was not posted with them’. His omission is implicitly explained in the novel's first, retrospective paragraph, which raises the familiar ‘rumours that [Guy] had ‘‘blotted his copybook’’ in West Africa’. In Sword of Honour, the novel conflating all three novels of the trilogy into a single volume, that opening retrospect and a reference to Guy's following ‘two blank years’ are cut and briskly replaced. Instead, we are told that by 1943 the forty-year-old Guy ‘grew scant of breath so that on field exercises he was prematurely exhausted and impatient’ (SH 542). Consequently, in August 1943 Guy's nameless brigadier legitimately refuses to take him overseas, because he is now too old to go into action. Thus Waugh camouflages his personal history by two explanations for Guy's declining military career – on the one hand his accumulation of unmerited black marks collected by Grace-Grounding-Marchpole, which was set up and sustained from Men at Arms onwards. And, on the other hand, the humdrum reality of his increasing age and physical limitations, which are no different from Waugh's.

At the end of Men at Arms, when Apthorpe died from Guy's smuggled bottle of whisky, it was the nameless brigadier who warned Guy that he never wanted to see him again. Guy's present rejection thus acquires an absurd significance: he feels that Apthorpe's ghost was not laid by the merely notional delivery of his bequest to Chatty Corner. ‘That ghost […] walked still in his porpoise boots to haunt him; the defeated lord of the thunder-box still worked his jungle magic.’ The dropped stitch of Officers and Gentlemen has been neatly picked up, initiating a curious voodoo motif that becomes important in this novel.

Guy's pagan superstition is promptly countered by his father's rational, humane values. In Gervase Crouchback's conversation with his son, Waugh raises the moral issues that will dominate and finally resolve Unconditional Surrender.