[In the following excerpt Bergonzi discusses the effects of World War I as presented in Parade's End.]

Parde's End is a trilogy or a tetralogy, depending on whether one accepts the final volume, Last Post, as an integral part of the total design. The first section, Some Do Not, came out in 1924, No More Parades in 1925, and A Man Could Stand Up in 1926. Last Post appeared in 1928; it seems that Ford wrote it because of the importunate desire of a woman friend to know what happened to his characters, and a few years later he virtually disowned it, saying that if the work was ever to appear in a single volume he would like it to do so as a trilogy. In fact, the one-volume American edition of 1950 included all four volumes; the recent Bodley Head reprint was restricted to three. Last Post is, indisputably, very different in tone and technique from the first three volumes of the sequence: it represents a certain desire on Ford's part to tie up loose ends, and at the same time to adopt a radically different mode of narration. Ford's critics are very much at variance about the place of Last Post in the sequence: Robie Macauley and Richard Cassell believe that it is essential to round off the work; whereas John Meixner has argued vehemently against this opinion, claiming that Parde's End forms an artistic whole only as a trilogy, and he is supported in this by Graham Greene in his introduction to the Bodley Head edition. My own view inclines towards the latter opinion; Last Post seems to be so loosely connected as to form a sequel rather than an integral part of the novel. As Meixner says, the trilogy, beginning with Ford's hero, Christopher Tietjens, travelling in a luxuriously appointed railway compartment, and ending, in the last paragraph of A Man Could Stand Up, with Tietjens celebrating Armistice Day in the empty flat from which his vindictive wife has stripped all the furniture, does have a distinct unity and symmetry.

Parde's End deals, in essentials, with the long martyrdom of Christopher Tietjens, officer and gentleman, who is subject to constant persecution, above all from his wife, the beautiful sexual terrorist, Sylvia, and, during the war, from his military superiors and from powerful civilians at home. Parde's End is, it seems to me, the finest novel by an Englishman to have been produced by the Great War; but at the same time, it can hardly be regarded simply as a 'war novel'.… Indeed, the whole of the magnificent opening section of Some Do Not takes place some years before the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, Parade's End does offer a profound imaginative grasp of the effect of the war on the traditional patterns of English life. In this novel we see a bringing together of the several dominant themes which … characterized the literature of the Great War: the supersession of the Hero as a tangible ideal; a nostalgic love of rural England, combined with an anguished sense that centuries of English tradition were being overthrown; the alienation of the soldier from the civilians. Ford embodies all these themes in Christopher Tietjens, a deeply and intensely realized figure whose presence provides the necessary unity of the first three volumes (he is largely absent from the scene in Last Post), and who is at the same time made to bear an unusually wide range of significance: he is the last true Tory, the final anachronistic embodiment of the virtues of the eighteenth-century English gentleman, an Anglican saint, even something of a Christfigure, turning the other cheek to his persecutors. And yet Tietjens is always recognizable as a living human being: fair, red-faced, large, slow-moving.

In the opening paragraph of Some Do Not, Ford brilliantly places Tietjens, and his friend Macmaster, in their appropriate context in the pre-war ruling class:

The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to The Times.

They live in a world which is ordered, controlled, predictable (even the railway upholstery's curves are both luxuriant and regulated); a world, too, of security and conspicuous consumption. And yet it is not entirely Tietjens's world, as the clear note of distancing irony in this description suggests; the succeeding paragraphs show that it is the young Scottish arriviste, Macmaster, who is the conscious upholder of Edwardian ruling-class attitudes. Tietjens, on the other hand, moves through this world with considerable indifference to the refinement of its mceurs. He is in but not of it—a brilliant mathematician working in the Imperial Department of Statistics—and his real allegiances are rooted in an older England, symbolized by the family home, Groby, in the North Riding.

Unquestionably, Tietjens, and what he stands for, is heavily romanticized by Ford. Half-German by birth, and the precocious child of a cosmopolitan, artistic household, Ford had had little opportunity to make extensive observations of the English gentry. There is both a simplicity and a glamour in his picture of Tietjens's Tory ideals that suggests a foreigner's romantic image of England; hence, perhaps, the high reputation of Parde's End in America (William Carlos Williams claimed that the four novels 'constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time'). Yet Ford's image is exaggerated rather than false: he shows us a familiar subject in an unfamiliar light, which may distort but also illuminates. Tietjens, the Yorkshire squire, stands for a more remote England than the Liberal England, centred on the week-end cottage in the Home Counties, of Forster and the Georgian poets; he preserves something of the feudal manner. In A Man Could Stand Up, Tietjens reflects in the trenches: 'The Feudal Spirit was broken. Perhaps it would therefore be harmful to Trench Warfare. It used to be comfortable and cosy. You fought beside men from your own hamlet under the leadership of the parson's son.'

One finds, too, an almost Gothic romanticism in Tietjens's conviction that there is a curse on Groby because the house was once dispossessed from its Catholic owners (the Tietjens family came over from Holland with William and Mary), and that the curse will not be lifted until Groby is once more in Catholic hands (as will happen when it is inherited by Tietjens's son, whom Sylvia is having brought up as a Catholic). Yet his visions of England have affinities with those entertained during the war years by writers of very different temperament. The following extract from one of Tietjens's reveries in the front line, evoked by hearing a cornet player practising an air by Purcell, recalls [passages from Lawrence's wartime letters] …:

The only satisfactory age in England! … Yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, tomorrow? In the sense that the age of, say, Shakespeare had a chance. Or Pericles! or Augustus!

Heaven knew, we did not want a preposterous drum-beating such as the Elizabethans produced—and received. Like lions at a fair.… But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows, slowly creeping ploughlands moving up the slopes? … Still, the land remains.…

The land remains… It remains!… At that same moment the dawn was wetly revealing; over there in George Herbert's parish.… What was it called? … What the devil was its name? Oh, Hell! … Between Salisbury and Wilton … The tiny church.… But he refused to consider the ploughlands, the heavy groves, the slow high-road above the church that the dawn was at that moment wetly revealing—until he could remember that name… He refused to consider that, probably even to-day, that land ran to … produced the stock of… Anglican sainthood. The quiet thing!

In part, the random, fragmentary quality of the writing here may be regarded as expressive of Tietjens's disordered consciousness, still not properly recovered from shell-shock and amnesia. But at the same time, these stylistic devices occur with uncomfortable frequency in the later volumes of Paade's End; compared with the mastery writing of Some Do Not, their prose is often uncontrolled and fluid, and the use of dots as punctuation becomes obsessive.

Like Lawrence, Ford was very conscious of living in a doomed society, though some of the reflections by which Tietjens expresses this conviction read a little oddly. As when, in Some Do Not, Tietjens is in earnest conversation with his brother Mark, and glances at the fountain of the Inner Temple by which they are standing: 'He considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This civilization had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by August.' Unlike Lawrence, Ford dramatizes rather than describes his conviction of social decay; there is nothing equivalent to the retrospective diatribes of Kangaroo. Tietjens is constantly shown as the honourable man harried by the low, unworthy forces that manifest themselves when the opulent Edwardian upper-class world, so vividly evoked in the novel's opening paragraphs, becomes corrupt in the atmosphere of war. Macmaster, the energetic social climber whom Tietjens has befriended and helped, picks his friend's brains and rises to a pinnacle of bureaucratic eminence, whilst Tietjens remains an obscure infantry officer. Tietjens is disgraced when his bank unjustly refuses to meet his cheques. We learn that the banker responsible is one of Sylvia's admirers. She explains to Tietjens:

'But of course he hates you for being in the army. All the men who aren't hate all the men that are. And, of course, when there's a woman between them, the men who aren't do all they can to do the others in. When they're bankers they have a pretty good pull.… '

And from Sylvia, Tietjens suffers unspeakable humiliations; in his study of their relationship Ford shows unsurpassed psychological insight. For several years they have sustained a marriage without mutual love; indeed, Sylvia has actively despised Tietjens. But when he falls in love with the young suffragette, Valentine Wannop, Sylvia's jealousy turns into a violent sexual passion for her husband, and when he fails to respond she turns to extremes of cruelty. Sylvia, though a monster, never entirely alienates the reader's sympathy. As V. S. Pritchett has shrewdly commented: 'One has a sneaking sympathy for his wife who at one moment complains that her husband is trying to be Jesus Christ as well as the misunderstood son of a great landowner. Her cruelties are an attempt to turn a martyr into a man.'

The word 'martyr' is, indeed, significant. Ford is trying to write a novel about a particular kind of hero; not the towering martial heroes of the Renaissance whose insufficiencies for the life of the Western Front had been sardonically glanced at by Barbusse; nor the ardent young votaries of the early months of the war, whose spirit was summed up in Julian Grenfell's 'Into Battle'. In so far as Tietjens is intended by his creator to be more than a private man, to embody certain national traditions and habits of mind, he has remote affinities with the ancient heroes of epic, though he reflects a Virgilian pietas rather than an Homeric virtù. More specifically, Tietjens is a passive and suffering hero, whose triumphs arise, not from violent action, but from patience (derived, ultimately, from patior, to suffer). The most famous example in English of this kind of hero is the Christ of Paradise Regained. Yet Ford, working without Milton's theological frame of reference, is less able to convince us of Tietjens's ultimate triumph. The novel (as opposed to such sharply generic forms as the thriller and the western) is not an easy form in which to accommodate heroic figures; its natural bias is so much to the realistic, the typical, the ordinary, that the presence of any figure of conspicuous stature and virtue is liable to set up ironic tensions. The drama remains, still, a more convincing vehicle for such types. In our final glimpse of Tietjens in Last Post, he has retired into quiet country life with Valentine, as a small-holder and antique-dealer; Sylvia has at least abated her hostility, and this perhaps represents a triumph for Tietjens, but he is now purely a private man and not a representative figure. His ancestral home, Groby, is leased to a crazy and destructive American woman; the symbolism is unmistakable.

In those scenes of Paade's End that deal specifically with the war in France, Tietjens's role as a suffering figure is underlined. In the opening chapter of No More Paades, Tietjens refuses—for very good reason—to give compassionate leave to a Welsh private called O Nine Morgan. A few minutes later the man is killed by a shell splinter. Tietjens bends over the body:

The heat from the brazier was overpowering on his bent face. He hoped he would not get his hands all over blood, because blood is very sticky. It makes your fingers stick together impotently. But there might not be any blood in the darkness under the fellow's back where he was putting his hand. There was, however: it was very wet.

Tietjens associates Morgan's death with his refusal of leave, and assumes a corresponding burden of guilt. Again, in the sustained section set in the trenches in A Man Could Stand Up, Tietjens rescues the young subaltern, Aranjuez, after he had been partly buried by a falling shell; he is carrying Aranjuez to safety when the boy suddenly runs off screaming, with his hands to his face. Tietjens thinks, disapprovingly, that Aranjuez has lost his nerve. Only later does he hear that he had been hit by a sniper and has lost an eye. Tietjens, already tormented beyond endurance by his private life, has to bear the infantry officer's common load of compassion and guilt for the sufferings of his men. He is also subjected to the animus of his new commanding officer, General Campion, a friend of Sylvia's, who transfers Tietjens to the ignominious task of guarding prisoners of war.

These trench scenes frequently manifest the fluidity of writing that is one of the major faults of the later sections of Paade's End. And Henry Williamson has attacked them, in 'Reality in War Literature', for inaccuracy of military detail and a general air of inauthenticity. Nevertheless, to an uninitiated reader, and despite their stylistic weaknesses, they convey a compelling impression of frontline life; more vividly, in fact, than many exact documentary descriptions. Ford was invariably an impressionistic artist rather than a reporter.

This discussion of Parade's End has only glanced at a few of its salient features, and has not done justice to its outstanding literary qualities. A full analysis, for instance, would trace Ford's virtuoso use of the time-shift technique in the first part of Some Do Not, and would examine in detail the superbly sensitive effects he could achieve by his characteristically impressionist prose. One could also dwell on the breadth and richness of his characters; in which, although an avowed disciple of Flaubert and James, Ford showed himself a possibly unconscious follower of the great Victorians. Tietjens himself, Sylvia, Valentine, General Campion, Edith Ethel Duchemin, all have an instinctive vitality. At the same time, one must admit the work's unevenness: effects which were triumphant in the first volumes become weakly repetitive in later ones. In particular, some of Ford's uses of the time-shift seem like devices for evading a possibly tricky narrative climax. The great expanse of the three—or four—volumes makes it clear that Ford was weak at sustaining the architectonics of a large fictional structure; his numerous successes are all local rather than large-scale, and Parade's End is, in toto, rather less than the sum of its distinguished parts.

Yet the work's traditional novelistic virtues do, in my view, undoubtedly transcend its failures of technique. In contrast to other prose works produced by the Great War, Parde's End offers little concrete documentation but a great deal of brilliant insight into the effects of that war. Tietjens's romantic Tory England was, no doubt, an extravagant concept; but its affinities with the more modest visions of the poets in uniform are sufficient to produce a recognizable picture. As I have suggested, Paade's End, more than any other work, succeeds in combining the dominant literary preoccupations of the war.

In the course of discussing Parade's End, V. S. Pritchett has observed, 'As a character Tietjens escapes from the cliche of almost all the war novels of that time in which the hero conveys that the whole war has been declared against him personally'.