The major theme of Sword of Honour is the impact of World War II upon the English nation. The first part of Men at Arms offers several glimpses of a country essentially at peace with its traditions but already nervously aware that forces beyond its comprehension are propelling it into an uncertain future. The actual outbreak of war brings panic and confusion: The cowardly flee overseas, children are taken from their urban families and evacuated to the country, and those in the military are rushed from one crisis point to another. The dominant images are those of uncertain movement, as everyone knows that he should be doing something but has only vague ideas as to what that something might be.

In Officers and Gentlemen, these essentially uncoordinated movements are brought under control through military training and discipline. Ineffectual and ridiculous though it turns out to be, Trimmer’s raid upon the enemy at least demonstrates a commitment to fighting back; although badly routed in the battle for Crete, the army does learn that it must adopt the kind of training and discipline exemplified by the Halberdiers if it is going to become an effective fighting force. Where Men at Arms depicts the destruction of some of the conventional certainties of English life, Officers and Gentlemen holds up to view a society which is beginning to pull itself together into the kind of social organism capable of functioning under the conditions of modern mass warfare.

The conclusion of the Sword of Honour trilogy, The End of the Battle, shows how this process has culminated in a society that bases its decisions upon pragmatic rather than moral or traditional grounds. This is made most explicit by the decision to support the Communist, rather than the royalist, partisans in Yugoslavia, a policy which for Waugh represents both a bow to the Soviet Union’s growing influence and a denial of England’s historical opposition to authoritarian and atheistic regimes. As a consequence of winning the war, Waugh seems to be saying, England has lost something of the distinctive qualities which made it a great nation; if Waugh understands the reasons that this has happened, he cannot help but mourn for the losses required by the necessity of victory on the battlefield.

This theme of the national response to the trauma of modern warfare is very similar to the theme of personality change under the stress of maturation that appears in so many novels of individual development, and in the awareness of the inexorability of such events, it is typically accompanied by nostalgia for the primal conditions of innocence and ignorance. Although Sword of Honour has been unsheathed in an idealistic determination to defend the integrity of English society, it will be returned to its scabbard only after that society has been pulled into the maelstrom of history’s insatiable cycle for destruction, transformation, and the unknown instabilities of the future.