SOURCE: "A Diamond of Pattern: The War of F. Madox Ford," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXX, No. 3, Summer, 1962, pp. 464-83.

[Gordon was an American author and educator. In the following essay, he offers a structural and thematic overview of No More Parades, the second novel of the Tietjens tetralogy.]

How we find any writer is so often a matter of where we first came in—of how we first encountered him, with what expectations and hopes. In the case of Ford Madox Ford there are over sixty wrong places for a first encounter and there is perhaps only one right one, since, as Ford knew, first impressions stick. The beginning reader should probably not begin with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Nor even with "The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage." There is a better spot than either of these—another window that opens onto more of the garden.

Here as elsewhere, chance has something to be said for it as a guide. It was perhaps actually a slight advantage back when the novels that make up Parade's End were as yet uncollected, when The Good Soldier was still out of print—indeed when almost all Ford's books were out of print. One then read what came his way, hit or miss, and with a minimum of prejudice. The official opening of Parade's End, the first scene of Some Do Not, lies suspiciously close to cliche: the two unnamed gentlemen who are found sitting in the elegant railway "carriage" just pulling out of the station. Its Edwardian prose is right but not arresting. And, in the collected reissue, the thickness of the volume lying in wait (836 pages) may give the reader pause. Besides, he has probably just finished considering Robie Macauley's introduction, which announces that this novel's subject is "the last Tory," and he may have decided that he is not much interested in Tories, first or last. But if the reader was so fortunate as to come to Ford deviously, by way of chance references to "Hueffer," picking up It Was the Nightingale overseas and later forgetting most of it except for a strange anecdote about a dung beetle and a Corsican bandit, and another about a lone man making a stew, to be followed considerably later by Ford's little book on the English novel with its brave defiance and the occasional howlers (Ford talks about the personal friendship between Caxton and Chaucer), and if he came finally upon No More Parades simply because the title was attractive and with no knowledge of its subject or its relation to the other novels in the tetralogy—never having heard of Tietjens—then its opening page produces for him the true shock of recognition as it places him in a familiar, stiff, square, resonant, and (oddly) brown world. No More Paades opens with the words:

When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws.

The scene is a hut in a replacement depot in France; the time is World War I. Outside there is an air raid going on. The brown light comes from "a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke"; there is a gleam of brass in the background, two officers; two men squat by the brazier ("as if hierarchically smaller"); at one end of the hut two noncommissioned officers droop over tables "in attitudes of extreme indifference." The only sound is the murmur of the two men by the glowing bucket—they had been miners—talking "in a low sing-song of dialect, hardly audible" and the dripping from the eaves of the hut. But the brown light soon is irradiated by brighter colors.

An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said, "Pack. Pack. Pack." In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these men—to the right, to the left, or down towards the tables, and crackling like that of flames among vast underwood became the settled condition of the night. Catching the light from the brazier as the head leaned over, the lips of one of the two men on the floor were incredibly red and full and went on talking and talking.

We catch the true Fordian note from the start. The prose is the quietest and suavest imaginable; to render noise the writer need not become noisy. Ford does not shout at us; rather, he is asking us to contemplate noise—battle noise. The tone is composed and the prose is composed; the noise is orchestrated for us. Two conversations are counter-pointed: the miner and his comrade who went on talking; the immense tea-tray with the august voice, to which the numerous pieces of sheet iron replied, "Pack. Pack. Pack." The note of insanity and horror is all in one detail, the lips that were "incredibly red and full and went on talking and talking." Ford once said that the tone he sought in his prose was that of one English gentleman whispering into the ear of another English gentleman. The miners here, to be sure, are not gentlemen, quiet though they may be. And of H. M. officers one is crazy and is soon roaring:

He began to talk, faster than ever, about a circle. When its circumference came whole by the disintegration of the atom the world would come to an end.

Here we are given a glimpse of violence in a matrix of quietness, of intimacy being violated by more than sound. No More Pardes opens brownly upon a world in which gentlemen, alas, will no longer whisper.

The four Tietjens novels—Some Do Not, No More Psrades, A Man Could Stand Up, Last Post—were written and published between the years 1924 and 1927 but were not brought together as a single book until a quarter of a century later. The collective title is Ford's (though there is some doubt as to whether he wished Last Post to be included). At the level of plot, Parade's End is the story of the relations between three principal characters: Christopher Tietjens, a mathematical genius and staunch Yorkshire squire, his estranged wife, Sylvia, and Valentine Wannop, a young suffragette he has come to love. In addition to these, there is Tietjens' godfather, who is a general under whom he will later serve (Campion), a mad Pre-Raphaelite Anglican clergyman famous for his breakfasts (Duchemin), an Irish priest (Father Consett), Sylvia's mother, Tietjens' brother Mark, and some other memorable lesser characters. Before their marriage Tietjens had seduced his future wife on a train; later when the child was born he learned from her that she did not even know whether he was its father. The husband and wife have become increasingly estranged. The first novel of the series, Some Do No4 introduces us to these characters a year or more before the outbreak of World War I, and shows them later at war, Tietjens being home on sick leave. In the second book, No More Pardes, Tietjens is—as we have seen—back in France serving in a giant replacement depot. Into this already chaotic scene his erring wife, Sylvia, suddenly erupts, creating added embarrassments and confusion. The later volumes take Tietjens to the front (where Sylvia cannot get to him) and then bring him home again.

When the four novels appeared together in 1950 as Parade's End, they were widely—and on the whole favorably—reviewed. The reviewers were all united on one point: they seemed preoccupied with the peacetime sections of the book. No one appeared to be much interested in the war. Mr. Macauley in his introduction defined Parade's End as social history of a prophetic sort, explaining that England had for decades been slipping, the old social order was corrupted or corroded, noblesse no longer obliged; the war was merely the coup de grace for a moribund society. And when Ford had said that his tetralogy was a war book—as he had—he was (Mr. Macauley's words) "hoaxing us." Some of the reviewers discussed the novel's formal qualities and all, of course, its content. But no one seemed much concerned about where the two meet: in the unique angle of vision that danger, and especially war, creates. Or perhaps it would be better to say unique quality of vision, all that takes place under brown light.

Ford himself seems to have been in no doubt about his subject: it was war, and No More Parades was the germinal volume. In much the way that Strether's conversation with little Bilham in the garden was the nub from which The Ambassadors grew, Tietjens' monologue to distract the mad McKechnie contains the germ for Parde's End. In that monologue Tietjens tells Captain McKechnie how at the beginning of the war he had visited the War Office and found in a room someone devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion.

"You can't say we weren't prepared in one matter at least.… Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades.… Don't you see how symbolical it was: the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won't. There damn well won't.… No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … Nor for the world, I dare say … None … Gone… Na poo, finny! No … more… parades!"

Ford's account of how his tetralogy was conceived is given in the autobiographical It Was the Nightingale, where he is discovered in postwar retirement—a sort of Cincinnatus-Henry James tending pigs.

I was covered with mud to the eyes, in old khakis, shorts and an old khaki army shirt…

A voice said over the hedge:

"Didn't I once meet you at Henry James's?"

Standing above me on the bank was the comfortable and distinguished figure of Sir Edward Elgar. I did not remember having met him at Henry James's but I knew him for the local great man—and of course as the composer of the Dream of Gerontius—and Land of Hope and Glory.

There came into my mind suddenly the words: "The band will play: 'Land of Hope and Glory'... The adjutant will say: 'There will be no more parades … '"

It worried me slightly that I could no longer be certain of all the phrases of that ceremonial for the disbanding of a battalion. Nothing in the world was further from my thoughts than writing about the late war. But I suppose the idea was somewhere in my own subconscious, for I said to myself:

"If I do not do something about it soon it is possible I shall forget about the details." And I wondered how the common friend of myself and Sir Edward would have treated that intractable subject. I imagined the tortuous mind getting to work, the New England scrupulousness, the terrific involutions … and for the rest of the day and for several days more I lost myself in working out an imaginary war-novel on the lines of "What Maisie Knew.…"

I found I still had by heart all the paragraphs of King's Regulations and Military Law that a regimental officer could be required to know. I went over in my mind every contour of the road from Bailleul to Locre, Locre-Pont de Nieppe, Nieppe down to Armentieres—and of all the byroads from Nieppe to Ploegsteert, Westoutre, Dramoutre. And I found that I could remember with astonishing vividness every house left, in September 1916, along the whole road, and almost every tree—and hundreds of shell holes!

The contours, be it noted, came first; the primary motive of Ford's war novel was scenic—an assertion that may appear improbable to the reader who still thinks of the novelist's trade as "story-telling" or to the other, perhaps more sophisticated, reader who looks at every novel as symbolic action. Nevertheless, Tietjens, Sylvia, Valentine Wannop, General Campion and the rest—their whole complex, funny, and sad imbroglio, and Parde's End's originality of form and style—all exist ultimately in order that Ford may penetrate and encompass that torn scene and recreate the particular kind of countryside that is called a battlefield. Tietjens' long parade begins and ends in a landscape.

Ford, incidentally, was never quite decided whether the resulting labor was one book or four—and with reason. The separate volumes follow one another more closely than sequels, yet each (with the exception of the last) is formally complete in itself, and, since much of what has happened is recapitulated in each new volume, they are best read with a certain interval of time between one and the next. In any case, to take in the whole tetralogy the critic must stand too far off. A look at a single volume reveals more, since each in petto reflects a pattern found in the whole. Of the four, No More Parades is probably the best. It also comes nearest to being central.

In structure, No More Parades is a strictly scenic novel. There is no general narrative: we are always locked up in a particular scene, but the scene in turn is locked up in a particular mind. It is a worrying mind, both anticipatory and mnemonic, since fragments of a remembered past and a looked-forward-to future are continually being filtered in. Henry James, in his preface to The Awkward Age, once explained the advantages he felt would accrue to the novelist who restricted himself, as nearly as possible, to the conventions of the stage-play. Ford's affinities, however, are more with the movies; his way of building up a scene—out of fragmented details, sudden "cuttings," shifts in "camera angle," etc.—closely resembles film montage. As a result we are if anything even more in the scene than James would have us—we are shut in, boxed in. In the opening scene of No More Paades there are stressed, almost to the point of claustrophobia, its indoor—even domestic—aspects. About all the doings in that hut there clings a suggestion of a monstrous tea party. The falling, and lethal, insides of shrapnel shells are called "candlesticks." Of the men by the brazier, one is muttering dejectedly about his unfaithful wife, one about a queer cow that "took a hatred for its cawve (up behind Caerphilly on the mountains)." The Canadian sergeant-major is worrying himself about a new pocket-book. The hut is shaped like the house a child draws. Inside, there is a curious air of false domesticity, into which the sounds of the outside come, appropriately, like the falling of a large tea-tray.

This depiction of soldiers under fire is (or ought to have been) the death of a noble cliché: war seen as outdoors living, active, virile. There is much cold, much wet, much mud in Ford's landscape, but there is very little action. Ford knew that war was mostly waiting. He also knew that in war one is always surrounded—if (please God!) not by the enemy, then by one's own side. Tietjens finds himself in a hut, in a depot, in an army, on a front, in a war—and in a whole cluster of tangled social situations, his own and others'. Outside, forward and beyond, is what? Unknown. Meanwhile, there is the waiting. Wait long enough and it will come. But when the outside does come in, when Death enters the hut, his appearance and manners are strangely domesticated and prove to be in keeping with the scene. The air raid has temporarily let up, the two runners have been sent out to see about candles and chow; but before long the planes return. There is more waiting. One runner re-enters with candles. There is now more light; the stage is set for someone's grand entrance. More talk takes place between the two officers, the younger becoming calmer—it is no longer his scene. As the elder officer (Tietjens) relaxes, his eyes play tricks on him; he has a piercing vision of his wife, "In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round and round in plaits over her ears. The features very clean-cut and thinnish; the teeth white and small; the breasts small; the arms thin, long and at attention at her sides." More waiting. Then:

A man, brown, stiff, with a haughty parade step, burst into the light. He said with a high wooden voice:

"'Ere's another bloomin' casualty." In the shadow he appeared to have draped half his face and the right side of his breast with crape. He gave a high, rattling laugh. He bent, as if in a stiff bow, woodenly at his thighs. He pitched, still bent, on to the iron sheet that covered the brazier, rolled off that and lay on his back across the legs of the other runner, who had been crouched beside the brazier. In the bright light it was as if a whole pail of scarlet paint had been dashed across the man's face on the left and his chest. It glistened in the firelight—just like fresh paint, moving!

This is vivid writing and not easily forgotten. It is only possible when (as Ford would say) the novelist has prepared his effects, as we have seen him doing. But the technical problem raised by writing of this sort—with its hard cameo outlines—is a matter of continuity: how to get on, how to mediate between one scene and the next. The very sharpness of impression prevents a flow, especially since anything like ordinary chronological continuity is avoided by Ford. Life does not narrate; it impresses itself upon our minds and senses; and that is what Ford sought through his brand of impressionism.

Ford's solution to the problem is hinted at in his curious, and controversial, little book on Joseph Conrad. He warns against the novelist's reporting whole speeches—for example, by a long-winded suburbanite in his garden: "If you gave all those long speeches one after the other you might be aware of a certain dullness when you reread that compte rendu. But if you carefully broke up petunias, statuary, and flower-show motives and put them down in little shreds, one contrasting with the other, you would arrive at something much more coloured, animated, lifelike and interesting…" The same principle, I believe, holds true for the large garden that is a battlefield: by laying down "in little shreds" such motives as blood, noise, mud, battle neurosis, relations between officers and men, thoughts of home, sexual excitement, interest in nature, etc., Ford creates an effect that might be thought of as fugal. Or—to alter the metaphor—like seeds, these motives will show a strong inclination to grow and force their way from one scene into the next, as they do so often, undergoing curious and interesting metamorphoses. They weave the parts of the book together—and do much more besides.

The image of dead O Nine Morgan will illustrate the method, whose blood "glistened in the firelight—just like fresh paint, moving!" The suggestions called to mind by fresh paint—its stickiness in particular—are horrible enough, but the last word caps them: moving! It sticks in our minds and Tietjens' (as the blood sticks on his shoes). Tietjens suffers a series of recalls. Particularly interesting is the way that death and his wife's sex mania are drawn together in most of these, as though the motive were a rope with strands in two different colors. The first recall comes the same evening when, tucked up in bed in his fleabag Tietjens is writing—jotting down as coolly and deliberately as he can, like a military estimate of the situation, the salient facts of his marital situation, hoping to find the answers to certain questions: Has his wife left him? Does that mean he will be free to live with Valentine Wannop? Should he? His thoughts are interrupted by the orderly who is carrying on a doleful conversation with an officer in another part of the tent, concerning the evening's casualty. Tietjens hears the orderly say:

"Poor-O Nine Morgan! …" and over the whitish sheet of paper on a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films of reddish purple to be wavering, then a glutinous surface of gummy scarlet pigment. Moving!

The second recall, coming two days later, is not of the blood directly but of a slowly moving brass door handle. The handle evokes a scene rather different from the replacement depot hut: a bedroom in an elegant hotel in the nearby town, where we find Tietjens with Sylvia, half-dressed, who has materialized in France with the same violence that Poor-O Nine Morgan had burst into the hut, made his succinct report and dropped dead. To create trouble Sylvia has left her bedroom door unlocked. An intoxicated M. P. colonel breaks in and is physically ejected by Tietjens who, as a consequence, is placed under arrest and confined to his quarters. But General Campion, wishing the whole thing hushed up, comes the next morning to inspect Tietjens' unit and orders him to accompany the inspecting party on its rounds. (The general and Tietjens both know that this in effect releases him from arrest.) Also, and compassionately, the general sends in by his aid, Colonel Levin, a bottle of smelling salts since Tietjens is understandably a bit shaky. But these do not have at all the bracing effect desired:

Tietjens asked himself why the devil the sight of that smelling-salts container reminded him of the brass handle of the bedroom door moving almost imperceptibly … and incredibly. It was, of course, because Sylvia had on her illuminated dressing-table, reflected by the glass, just such another smooth, silver segment of tubing. Was everything he saw going to remind him of the minute movement of that handle?

The analogy between the two movements—the blood and the door handle—and the two scenes apparently does not occur to Tietjens the bond being an unconscious one.

In the painful interview with the general that follows, Tietjens receives a movement order—to the front (to which he desperately doesn't want to go). He has, after all, been on his feet for two days and has suffered a series of shocks. He panics rather badly. It is mud that particularly upsets him, and with the news of his movement order comes another involuntary memory—of the trenches. Mud not only rhymes with blood, and is sticky like it, but it also sometimes moves—horribly.

In November … A beginning of some November … With a miracle of sunshine: not a cloud: the mud towering up shut you in intimately with a sky that ached for limpidity … And the slime had moved … following a French bombardier who was strolling along eating nuts, disreputably, his shoulders rolling… Deserteurs … The moving slime was German deserters … You could not see them: the leader of them—an officerl—had his glasses so thick with mud that you could not see the colour of his eyes, and his half-dozen decorations were like the beginnings of swallows' nests, his beard like stalactites.…Of the other men you could only see the eyes—extraordinarily vivid: mostly blue like the sky!

The final recall—coming late in the book—is, appropriately, undisguisedly, of O Nine Morgan, once again coming by way of Sylvia. Near the close of the interview the general, now adopting a fatherly, or avuncular, tone, asks the one question that for Tietjens is the most upsetting: "Why don't you divorce?"

Panic came over Tietjens. He knew it would be his last panic of the interview. No brain could stand more. Fragments of scenes of fighting, voices, names, went before his eyes and ears. Elaborate problems.…The whole map of the embattled world ran out in front of him—as large as a field. An embossed map in greenish papier mdch&-—a ten-acre field of embossed papier mdche: with the blood of O Nine Morgan blurring luminously over it.

This motive of O Nine Morgan's blood is merely a single instance; in No More Pardes, and the tetralogy as a whole, there are dozens of others. What Ford said looking back at The Good Soldier applies also here: "… I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references." And, in Paade's End at least, it is a tangle that moves—and not a tangle either but a fugue, as scene follows scene threaded on not one string but many.

The war as seen by Ford Madox Ford is not quite the war of Hemingway, or of Tolstoi, or Stephen Crane, or anyone else—though it is tempting to suggest that it might almost have been Henry James's ("a war-novel on the lines of 'What Maisie Knew' "). For other writers the key fact of war and not-war (one hesitates to say peace) is their separation. The soldier is, in action and out, hardly the same man. When Lieutenant Henry is busy retreating from Caporetto, he is busy retreating from Caporetto, winging deserters, dodging Austrians, and so on; when he is safe in Milan eating midnight sandwiches with Catherine Barkley, he is eating midnight sandwiches—and never the twain shall meet. Not so with Ford's soldiers. Each is, as Ford put it, "homo duplex: a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place but whose mind and personality brood eternally over another distant locality." It is this persistent doubleness that controls the ranges of horror, of which Ford presents quite a bit. And yet—and this is the point I wish to stress—Ford's presentation of horror is not harrowing. Indeed, on reflection, his depiction of war seems principally comic—though we may have to stretch our conception of comedy and scrap some received ideas about what subjects are intrinsically funny. Bedroom farce, for example, is usually regarded as inherently comic, dying not. And yet…

Consider Sylvia. Eros and thanatos, Venus bedded with Mars—who is Sylvia and what is she? Though a pacifist who hates war, Sylvia Tietjens has a curious affinity with it. It is symbolically apt and right, I think, that, where Valentine Wannop is unimaginable in wartime France, Ford should bring Sylvia across the Channel and develop her line of destruction in counterpoint with that of the war. Even Sylvia seems half to know that she and war are one flesh, a single perverse will, when she realizes, as she puts it, that she is "in the very belly of the ugly affair." In her, peace and war meet, cruelly and absurdly.

Ultimately, Sylvia stands for the Ruling Classes and the established order of pre-war England—the order which led to, and collapsed in, the war. Though she hardly realizes this, she is its direct embodiment. She is a marvellously convincing depiction of tradition in decay, not the decay of paralysis and torpor but the decay of boredom, of keeping up appearances, which leads to endless restless irresponsibility; she is cruel, yet brave and noble, even at moments generous—not wholly distinct from Tietjens himself. That is one reason why Sylvia is so convincing. All of these characters are members of the same leisured society that Ford once described as "fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated—and doomed." Sylvia is merely its most virulent—and in some ways most attractive—manifestation. Tietjens breaks with it only in his final break with her.

But by far the most important point about Sylvia, and one which might easily be overlooked, is that she is among other things a splendid comic heroine—or comic villainess rather. The embarrassments that she creates are nearly always funny and the humor is not lost on her. She has a keen wit and a sense of the incongruous, even at her own expense, as in the words with which she finally gives up Tietjens to the somewhat mousy though virtuous Valentine, who by now is his de facto wife. Sylvia says:

"An the King will have my head I carena what he may do with my …"

The allusion is to the words of her fellow papist Fraser of Lovat just before he was executed in the 'Forty-five. Ford explains: "They had told him on the scaffold that if he would make some sort of submission to George II they would spare his body from being exhibited in quarters on the spikes of the buildings in Edinburgh. And Fraser had answered: 'An the King will have my heid I care not what he may do with my—,' naming a part of a gentleman that is not now mentioned in drawing rooms."

Sylvia, indeed, comes very close to being Ford's muse, since Ford's continual juxtapositions, the altercations he contrives for his characters, the "perspectives by incongruity," superimposing war on peace and peace on war, create a way of looking at things that can only be described as comic. Comedy permeates Ford's world at even its grimmest, even in the death of O Nine Morgan. In our last glimpse of him (in person, as distinct from the recalls) he is being carried "in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell."

Northrop Frye has observed [in his "The Argument of Comedy," English Institute Essays, 1948,1949] that comedy "contains a potential tragedy within itself. With regard to the latter, Aristophanes is full of traces of the original death of the hero which preceded his resurrection in the ritual. Even in New Comedy the dramatist usually tries to bring his action as close to a tragic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and reverses this movement as suddenly as possible." Certainly these ritual elements—of death and resurrection—might be looked for in such a novel as A Man Could Stand Up, Christopher Tietjens having about him much of the sacrificial hero (as Sylvia remarks to Sergeant-Major Cowley: "They used to say: 'He saved others; himself he could not save … '"). This is, however, not the path that I wish to follow at present. Rather, I would like to revert to certain consequences of the curiously closed-in quality of Ford's scene. Out there and a little beyond is unnamed horror: the horror of what lies beyond the front lines, of No Man's Land, of the unknown, from which for the most part we take cover with varying degrees of success. Were the action placed out there, as it is in much of the Iliad, it would necessarily be tragic. But Ford's characters remain enclosed, boxed-up, holed-in. We—the readers and the characters—await the inevitable intrusion, and when it comes it is horrid and macabre, but not tragic. It is more than anything absurd, since in this shut-in scene the social norms of a life of reason and common sense (or what passes for them) have, despite all, been preserved, in particular such matters as rank and class. These are simply incommensurate with the intruding horror, and it with them. So, when death enters in the guise of O Nine Morgan, for a brief time the social norms are shattered—for one thing his blood gets on an officer's shoes—but the normal is quickly re-established. It is perhaps this very quickness, indeed, which keeps the rhythm comic.

The phenomenon is of course not merely a wartime one. In peacetime the same is true; death, chaos, and madness being no respecters of our abstractions "war,". "peace." This Ford knows as he shows us the same pattern working out quite early in Some Do Not, for example at the breakfast with the mad clergyman or, later, a road accident in the fog. Always the scene is an interior (though the walls may be only of vapor) into which there is a violent intrusion, a very brief dispersal, and a quick regrouping. The very recurrences of this pattern suggest a further structural principle: each such boxed-in interior—whether of hut, or hotel bedroom, or telephone booth on Armistice Day, or elegantly appointed railway carriage, or dugout at the front—comes to suggest all the rest. As the novel proceeds we are translated, as though by metamorphosis, from one interior to the next, and to the extent that we are aware of this strange transmogrifying process—this sliding-away of panels—we must find the whole process comic. Indeed, these rapidly shifting perspectives are implicit in the minutiae of Ford's writing and, as such, probably make themselves felt from the start.

The shadings of Ford's war comedy cover a wide range. Some of his queer juxtapositions, though they make their point, seem fairly obvious. There is Tietjens composing a sonnet in under three minutes to rhymes supplied by McKechnie while signing incredible numbers of papers for incredible numbers of soldiers of a draft that is on its way up the line. There is the highly efficient Sergeant-Major Cowley's penchant for sudden transformations: "The sergeant-major, now a deferential shopwalker in a lady's store, pointed out that they had had urgent instructions not to send up the draft…," "the sergeant-major, now a very important solicitor's most confidential clerk, etc." There is the inappropriate name of the general's war horse, "Sweedle-pumpkins." But at its best the comedy is not obvious at all, as in this little glimpse of Sylvia's peculiar way of torturing her husband: "She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the southwest corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bed-rooms above it.… He winced: he certainly winced at that." And there are bits of battle-humor, so thoroughly a part of the atmosphere of an army at—or near—the front ("Do you know the only time the King must salute a private soldier and the private takes no notice? … When 'e's dead.… ") From this, Ford modulates to something far more eerie and grotesque as the sergeant-major explains to Mrs. Tietjens how at Noircourt the captain had stumbled:

"Caught 'is foot, 'e 'ad, between two 'ands.… Sticking up out of the frozen ground … As it might be in prayer.… Like this!" He elevated his two hands, the cigar between the fingers, the wrists close together and the fingers slightly curled inwards: "Sticking up in the moonlight … Poor devil!"

Horrible? Haunting? Funny? Or terrifying? It is hard to say which this is. It is all and more, with its faint echoes of Dante; and it is not quite like any other writing about war that one can think of, nor like any other twentieth-century prose. It is a high and horrible comedy, with much compassion played off against an unrelenting pressure of the absurd.

The whole movement of Ford's tetralogy comes to a brief rest, as it should, in a fine scene at the end of No More Parades, a repetition of the familiar pattern of intrusion—if we can so characterize a general's inspection. The fall of France at this point appears imminent, and the fall of Tietjens with it; yet the ending Ford supplies is comic, light, and gay. It follows the disagreeable private interview between General Campion and Tietjens and serves both as a recapitulation and a comic coda. Tietjens, we are told, had earlier been given a moment to alert his cook-house of the approaching inspection.

"You can do what you please," the sergeant-cook said, "but there will always be one piece of clothing in a locker for a G. O. C. 1. c.'s inspection. And the general always walks straight up to that locker and has it opened. I've seen General Campion do it three times."

"If there's any found this time, the man it belongs to goes for a D. C. M.," Tietjens said. "See that there's a clean diet-sheet on the messing board."

"The generals really like to find dirty clothing," the sergeant-cook said, "it gives them something to talk about if they don't know anything else about cook-houses.… I'll put up my own diet-sheet, sir.… I suppose you can keep the general back for twenty minutes or so? It's all I ask."

At the conclusion of his interview with Tietjens the general said:

… You can fall out."

Tietjens said:

"My cook-houses, sir … Sergeant-Cook Case will be very disappointed… He told me that you couldn't find anything wrong if I gave him ten minutes to prepare.…"

The general said:

"Case … Case … Case was in the drums when we were at Delhi. He ought to be at least Quartermaster by now.… But he had a woman he called his sister.

Tietjens said:

"He still sends money to his sister."

The general said:

".. He went absent over her when he was colour-sergeant and was reduced to the ranks.… Twenty years ago that must be!… Yes, I'll see your dinners!"

Sergeant Case's situation, it is readily apparent, is analogous to Tietjens', but with a difference—he is a man who has been both ruined and not ruined by his woman. He keys us for the novel's finale. No More Parades began with the words "When you came in"; it ends with a locker door opening.

The building paused, as when a godhead descends. In breathless focusing of eyes the godhead, frail and shining, walked with short steps up to a high-priest who had a walrus moustache and, with seven medals on his Sunday tunic, gazed away into eternity. The general tapped the sergeant's Good Conduct ribbon with the heel of his crop. All stretched ears heard him say:

"How's your sister, Case? …"

Gazing away, the sergeant said:

"I'm thinking of making her Mrs. Case.

Slightly leaving him, in the direction of high, varnished, pitch-pine panels, the general said:

"I'll recommend you for a Quartermaster's commission any day you wish.… Do you remember Sir Garnet inspecting field kitchens at Quetta?"

All the white tubular beings with global eyes resembled the pierrots of a child's Christmas nightmare. The general said: "Stand at ease, men … Stand easy!" They moved as white objects move in a childish dream. It was all childish. Their eyes rolled.

Sergeant Case gazed away into infinite distance.

"My sister would not like it, sir," he said. "I'm better off as a first-class warrant officer!"

With his light step the shining general went swiftly to. the varnished panels in the eastern aisle of the cathedral. The white figure beside them instantly tubular, motionless and global-eyed. On the panels were painted: TEA! SUGAR! SALT! CURRY PDR! FLOUR! PEPPER!

The general tapped with the heel of his crop on the locker-panel labelled PEPPER: the top, right-hand locker-panel. He said to the tubular, global-eyed white figure beside it: "Open that, will you, my man? …"

To Tietjens this was like the sudden bursting out of the regimental quick-step, as after a funeral with military honours the band and drums march away, back to barracks.