On 13th March 1938, judgment was passed in the political show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, former head of the Soviet Politburo. He was sentenced to death. Bukharin was taken in silence from the dock to the exit to the cells. He paused at the door and cast his eyes up to the gallery that contained the free world’s press. Fitzroy Maclean was sitting there. As Bukharin stepped into the darkness, Maclean looked across the courtroom. Joseph Stalin had appeared in the gallery opposite. The dictator gazed impassively after the vanishing Bukharin, his paranoia quelled for the moment.
That scene of terrifying injustice explains why Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, written of so brilliantly by Steven McGregor yesterday, descends into bitterness and despair.
Waugh and Maclean served in Yugoslavia, observing Marshal Tito’s guerrilla campaign against the Axis powers. Guy Crouchback, the hero of Sword of Honour, also finds himself in the Balkans fighting alongside communists, and loathes every minute of it.
For Crouchback, the war had begun as a noble struggle against the godless totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. The devout and reactionary Crouchback resolves to join the army shortly after the dictators’ non-aggression pact. The narrator says, ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’
His righteous certainty dissolves after Britain sides with Soviet Russia. Guy first learns of the re-ordered world while convalescing in Egypt after the Crete disaster in June 1941. ‘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 seems perverse to think of the Second World War as dishonourable, but replacing one tyranny with another undermined the logic of an armed struggle for freedom, tolerance and lasting peace.
Waugh expressed his disillusion in a long report titled ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’, written during his tour of Yugoslavia (1944-45). He argued that the Catholic Church would be oppressed by Tito’s communists, and predicted that sectarian violence would break out between Serbian Orthodox Christians and Croatian Catholics. Britain, he concluded, was abetting great evil by allying with communists.
Douglas Lane Patey’s biography analyses Waugh’s prescient account of the Balkan future, noting that Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s eyes and ears in Yugoslavia, went on the record saying that the report ‘gave a reasonably fair picture’ of religious affairs.
Maclean’s primary concern, though, was the existential threat to the West posed by communism — the sight of Bukharin being marched to undeserved oblivion had etched an eradicable mark on his mind. Maclean frequently warned the prime minister of Tito’s political intentions. He recounted the substance of one of these conversations in his 1949 memoir, Eastern Approaches:
‘”Do you intend,” he [Churchill] asked, “to make Jugoslavia your home after the war?”
“No, Sir,” I replied.
“Neither do I,” he said. “And that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of Government they set up, the better.”’
Churchill’s cynicism made Maclean, Crouchback and Waugh doubt that the means to Hitler’s defeat were worthwhile. Given what has happened in Eastern Europe and the Balkans since 1945, they had a point.
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