Dynamics of the Enemy

the tomb of an obscure English knight, Roger of Waybroke, waylaid on the way to his own Crusade and buried there “far from Jerusalem, far from Waybroke, a man with a great journey still all before him and a great vow unfulfilled”: “Sir Roger, pray for me,” Guy asked, “and for our endangered kingdom.”

Guy’s Crusade is short-lived. By the time of the alliance with Russia in 1941, he felt himself “back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of Illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant men proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor.” By 1943, when The End of the Battle begins, he is back in London, a London crowded with old people, disorder, fragments of things once known. As the end of the war approaches, the heaviest awareness of all strikes him: that whatever it had been to which he had dedicated himself on the tomb of Sir Roger that day in 1939, it had not been a Crusade. As he is told by a displaced person, “Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by war. . . .

EG

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Elgin Groseclose

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the tomb of an obscure English knight, Roger of Waybroke, waylaid on the way to his own Crusade and buried there “far from Jerusalem, far from Waybroke, a man with a great journey still all before him and a great vow unfulfilled”: “Sir Roger, pray for me,” Guy asked, “and for our endangered kingdom.”

Guy’s Crusade is short-lived. By the time of the alliance with Russia in 1941, he felt himself “back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of Illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant men proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor.” By 1943, when The End of the Battle begins, he is back in London, a London crowded with old people, disorder, fragments of things once known. As the end of the war approaches, the heaviest awareness of all strikes him: that whatever it had been to which he had dedicated himself on the tomb of Sir Roger that day in 1939, it had not been a Crusade. As he is told by a displaced person, “Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by war. . . .