The Military Philosophers was published by Heinemann in 1968, completing the war trilogy. Jenkins is now attached to the War Office in London, serving as a liaison officer with allied military forces — Poles, Czechs, Free French, Belgians — a role that puts him at the intersection of military bureaucracy, international politics, and the social world of wartime London.
The volume’s title alludes to Robert Burton and the tradition of melancholy reflection on human folly — appropriate for a novel set during the final years of a war that has destroyed much of the world the earlier volumes described. Characters who were young in the 1920s are now middle-aged, damaged by the war in ways that are not always visible. Stringham, whose alcoholism has been a thread since the first volume, reaches his end. Widmerpool, predictably, thrives in the military bureaucracy — the war has given him exactly the kind of impersonal power structure in which his talents for manipulation and self-advancement flourish.
The novel’s most memorable set piece is the Victory Day service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Jenkins encounters characters from across the entire sequence — a moment of convergence that demonstrates Powell’s architectural mastery. The Dance’s characters, scattered by war, are briefly reunited, and the reader sees how far they have come from the schoolboys warming themselves by a fire in the first volume.
Collecting The Military Philosophers
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1968): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $60–$150
- Very good/very good: $25–$60