Returning from Alexandria, Guy Crouchback finds himself adrift, between postings or in transit or tucked away in some meaningless billet. He is not aware, though we are, that an obscure office of military intelligence has tainted his reputation because he has inadvertently and innocently been in proximity of enemy agents, an Italian restauranter/spy, a mad Scottish pamphleteer and, in Alexandrea, a faux priest/spy. He is denied assignment to Italy where his language talents would be most useful and is sent to the Balkans. Crouchback is also adrift internally, he doubts his moral compass, as do we. When he dismisses out of hand the deplorable plight of a large group of Jewish displaced persons, it appears he has lost even his decency. Then in an attempt to make amends he tries to befriend one of the Jews, Mme. Kanyi. That does not turn out well. The partisans, seeing her contact with the British, execute her and her family. In an act of selflessness, he re-marries Virginia who is broke and bears a child to the scoundrel, Trimmer.
I think the title Unconditional Surrender refers to Crouchback who near the end of the novel comes to a point when he announces a fervent wish for death. Waugh wraps up the plot in an Epilogue, kills off Virginia and gives Crouchback a "happy" wife and children, satisfying some of his readers, no doubt, but not this one.

I was deep into this book before realizing that the title, Unconditional Surrender, doesn’t refer so much to the demands the Allies imposed on the Axis powers in World War Two as it does to the self-imposed requirements of Catholic spirituality.
Waugh, a convert to Catholicism, had a fascination for recusant dynasties—those ancient families who held to the Old Faith in the Reformation. What centuries of disablement and even, at times, persecution had failed to do, seems to be accomplished in two generations of modern life in the mid-twentieth century: their irreversible decay.
This was chronicled in the case of the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited. In the Sword of Honor trilogy, of which this is the final volume, World War Two is the backdrop as the Crouchbacks (like Flyte, a wonderfully chosen name) suffer a similar fate.
That this is the theme isn’t clear in the first two books of the trilogy, which seem more concerned to demonstrate that “military” and “intelligence” are mutually exclusive terms. But in this book, the relative weight of the two themes switches. More the shame that the American publishers chose to rename the book The End of the Battle.
In many ways, Guy Crouchback, the protagonist, seems an alter ego for the author, whose own military service included similar stations, culminating for both in a disillusioning stint as a liaison in the Balkans. A more diffident protagonist is hard to imagine, more anti-hero than hero. Yet, Guy holds the various threads of the storylines of the many other recurring characters together, and we learn more of his interiority than of any other character.
Yet there is another candidate for the author’s stand-in. In Brideshead, there is an observer, Charles Ryder, who chronicles the Flytes’ descent. In Sword of Honor, there is a parody of Charles in the form of Ludovic, the would-be literato who manages to be both sinister and ludicrous. His obsession with dictionary and thesaurus lampoons Waugh’s characterization of his own writing: “I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language,” words quoted on the flyleaf of the Penguin edition. One of the best set-pieces in the book is Ludovic’s first meeting with his publisher and their mutual incomprehension.
Overall, this book is darker in tone than the other two books in the trilogy. Yet somehow Guy survives the war, as well as his penchant for innocent blunders that repeatedly arouse the suspicion of counterintelligence. So in a way, it’s a dark book with a happy end. ( )

This is the third entry in Waugh's "Sword of Honour" series about life on the English home front and in the English army during World War Two. The narrative gets darker as the war progresses, and the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, sees the noble and honourable reasons for the war, and his own participation in it, evaporate into cynicism and distrust. In the meantime, as the buzz bombs begin to fall over London, those muddling through the war years at home live in ever-increasing discomfort about the degree to which their world will have forever changed, and all that's been lost to them.

The theme of the whole trilogy, perhaps, is summed up toward the end (this will not be a plot spoiler) when Guy, posted to Yugoslavia to act as liaison between the British army and the local Communist partisans, has a conversation with Jewish woman who is a defacto leader of the local Jewish community that, having as much to fear from the partisans as they had had from the Nazis, has been petitioning the British government for asylum or at least transport to Italy. The woman asks Guy:

"Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians--not very many--who felt this. Were there none in England?"

The first book of the series was the easiest to read; this third book is the best of the series and certainly the most thought-provoking. ( )

Qui connaît cet écrivain plus british que Kipling, Margaret Thatcher et Lewis Carroll réunis ne s'étonnera pas que la trilogie Hommes en armes - à laquelle La Capitulation vient mettre un point d'orgue - ait pu être décrite comme une œuvre totale. C'est qu'aussi bien Waugh fut un réactionnaire pas comme les autres, furieux et plein d'humour à la fois, dont la verve devait tôt ou tard, face à la fin d'un monde - le seul qu'il admettait -, s'exercer avec une sorte de jubilation désespérée à l'égard de tout ce qui avait pu mener la fière Albion à ce triste point de non-retour : la modernité.

Guy Crouchback has lost his Halberdier idealism. A desk job in London gives him the chance of reconciliation with his former wife. Then, in Yugoslavia, as a liaison officer with the partisans, he finally becomes aware of the futility of a war he once saw in terms of honour.