Published by Chapman & Hall from 1952 to 1961, the novels are: Men at Arms (1952); Officers and Gentlemen (1955); and Unconditional Surrender (1961), marketed as The End of the Battle in the United States and Canada.

Crouchback meets the fire-eating Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook (probably based on Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a college friend of Waugh's father-in-law whom Waugh knew somewhat from his club), and Apthorpe, a very eccentric fellow officer; in an episode of high farce, the latter two have a battle of wits and military discipline over an Edwardian thunder-box (portable toilet) which Crouchback observes, amused and detached.

Crouchback eventually finds a place in a fledgling commando brigade training on a Scottish island under an old friend, Tommy Blackhouse, for whom Virginia left him.

He learns to exploit the niceties of military ways of doing things from Colonel "Jumbo" Trotter, an elderly Halberdier who knows all the strings to pull.

She arranges for Crouchback to be sent the long way home to England, possibly to prevent him from compromising the cover story worked up to protect Claire from desertion charges.

He is appalled by the partisans, befriends a small group of Jews, and finds out that his former friend de Souza's loyalties are with the Communists rather than with Britain.

On his late father's advice, Guy attempts individual acts of salvation, but these ultimately make matters worse for the recipients.

Waugh altered this ending to an uncompromisingly childless marriage in the revised text, after realising that some readers interpreted such a conclusion as hopeful.

The novels have obvious echoes in Evelyn Waugh's wartime career; his participation in the Dakar expedition, his stint with the commandos, his time in Crete and his role in Yugoslavia.

The novel is the most thorough treatment of the theme of Waugh's writing, first fully displayed in Brideshead Revisited: a celebration of the virtues of tradition, of family and feudal loyalty, of paternalist hierarchy, of the continuity of institutions and of the heroic ideal and the calamitous disappearance of these which has led to the emptiness and futility of the modern world.

It paints an ironic picture of regimental life in the British Army and is a satire on the wasteful and perverse bureaucracy of modern warfare.

The point of view of Guy, whose Roman Catholicism and Italian experience combine with his diffident personality to make him something of an outside observer in English society, enables Waugh to push the satire hard and remain in voice.

The novel reveals his discovery that the romantic worship of tradition and heroism – the aristocratic values which have supported him all his life – does not work in the modern world.

Before being sent to Moscow, it is put on display to the British public in Westminster Abbey; long queues of people "suffused with gratitude to their remote allies" come to worship it.

It is a resigned rather than an idealistic Guy who goes to Yugoslavia, and it is made clear that the future belongs not to idealism but to the cynical Trimmer or the empty American Padfield.