I wondered too about what the whole fight had accomplished, if human evil was simply going to continue. But regarding World War II: Susan Cooper said in one of her essays that the series derived very much from her experience as a child in World War II, and the ways in which the "Light" (the British) demonized the "Dark" (the Germans), in the same manner that the Crusaders demonized their enemy. In other words, the moral ambiguity of the Light in the Dark is Rising series was quite deliberate on the author's part.