England, and continued to write propaganda for the government. But he enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment, and remained in the army until January 1919. His military experience was very varied. Although at the Front for only two months, he witnessed what he described at the time as ‘the two greatest strafes of history’, the Battle of the Somme, and the Ypres Salient.2 He was frequently under bombardment, and suffered from concussion, shell-shock, and lung damage. He was attached to the First Line Transport, which kept him moving between the Front and the support lines. He was also in base camps, a casualty clearing station, army hospitals, even a bombed train. For a time he was responsible for a group of prisoners of war. From the spring of 1917 he was judged too unwell to serve in France, and was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed in North Wales. Then he was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. In 1918 he was promoted to captain, and attached to the Staff, going ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’.3
The war redefined the rest of his life and work; and his experience of it was transformed into Parade’s End. This is not to say it is an autobiographical roman-a- clef. Many of Tietjens’ experiences were Ford’s – especially his shell-shock, and skirmishes with military authorities – but some were not. Tietjens is also partly based on Ford’s mathematician friend, the Yorkshireman Arthur Marwood, though Marwood was too unwell for the army.
Parade’s End isn’t exactly a ‘historical novel’ either, though it is intensely concerned with the texture and nature of history. Ford could write historical novels and romances as well as any Edwardian author. His best form the trilogy about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen, also available in a Penguin edition, introduced by A. S. Byatt. Parade’s End’s central character, Christopher Tietjens, doesn’t brush with real historical figures, like heroes in Scott or Tolstoy. But one of the many strange qualities about Tietjens is that he sometimes seems to be history embodied. His encyclopaedic memory is the repository of the past. His name, too, compacts history and nationality. Is it British? How is it pronounced? We discover that his ancestors came to England from Holland with William of Orange. Ford’s own father, Franz Huffer, emigrated to London from northern Germany, anglicizing his name to Francis Hueffer, and becoming music critic of The Times. If Tietjens thus reflects Ford’s composite European identity, he also looks back to past convulsions – the Reformation; the Glorious Revolution; the Napoleonic wars.
Ford said that in conceiving these novels he ‘wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time’.4 This may seem to confuse the two modes of fiction and history, or to suggest that the best novels are historical. But the novelist’s pride may have less to do with imitating the historian than with redefining history: saying that the best histories are in fact novels. There is a second kind of playful confusion in the turn of his phrase. In what sense can you write ‘history’ of your own time? Perhaps the novelist can write, or dares to write, the history that the historian generally doesn’t – though in the long twentieth century eminent exceptions such as Eric Hobsbawm and Francis Fukuyama have followed Ford’s lead, and attempted the history of the present. And, as in Fukuyama’s case, the historical significance of that present was that it seemed the end of history. Mary McCarthy has written of ‘the faith in History, which was shattered by an historical event – the impact of the First World War’.5 Warfare, of course, is particularly likely to make you feel that you could become history at any moment. But Ford was always profoundly attuned to the poignancy of the transient, and to the fact that to describe experience is to write its elegy. The individual and collective titles sound the elegiac note of the whole project: especially The Last Post: the bugle call marking both the end of a day and the end of a life. On a personal level, the elegy is for Tietjens’ brother, Mark. But it is also for all the war dead; for the passing of a way of life – of feudal estates like the Tietjens’ at Groby; for the end of history; and for the end of the old ways of writing about these things.
A world war was unprecedented. Like many who wrote about it, Ford represents it in eschatological terms: as Armageddon, the last battle marking the end of mortal life. This sense of the war as an abyss in the substance of history figures in Parade’s End. Valentine Wannop, the woman who will become Tietjens’ lover, gets a job teaching at a girls’ school. On the day of the Armistice, recorded at the beginning and ending of the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up –, the staff are anxious that they will lose control of the girls in the excitement. Valentine thinks of the moment of the ending of the war as: ‘this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History’ (p. 510).
Henry James had used a comparable image for the war’s rending of history, in a clairvoyant time-defying sentence written at its outbreak:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.6
These words have been quoted apropos The Good Soldier, Ford’s other masterpiece, published in 1915: a novel which doesn’t treat the war itself, though it circles around the date on which war broke out the previous year – 4 August. Yet they are even more apposite to Parade’s End. The tetralogy plunges its central characters – Tietjens; his magnificently drawn, vindictive wife Sylvia; Valentine; Tietjens’ colleague Macmaster; and his lover Edith Ethel Duchemin – into the abyss of what George Dangerfield called The Strange Death of Liberal England. In the first volume, Some Do Not…, repressed Edwardian idylls figure only to be plunged into blood and darkness: the extraordinary breakfast scene in which the Revered Duchemin has one of his prurient insane outbursts; the dogcart ride that throws Tietjens and Valentine together, enveloped in magical Romney Marsh mist, ending in a crash with General Campion’s ominous car. The second volume, No More Parades, shows Tietjens at the Front, in danger of breaking down under the strain of bombardments, of military responsibilities, of being pursued by Sylvia right to the war zone, of being persecuted by his superiors. A Man Could Stand Up –, the third volume, has him waiting to face a German attack, being buried by a nearby shell explosion, and somehow coming out alive; all this sandwiched between the Armistice scenes taking place later, in London, after Tietjens’ return. Finally, in The Last Post, all the characters engage in what Ford called elsewhere ‘the painful processes of reconstruction’.7 Ford was justifiably proud of his and Conrad’s contribution to the use of the ‘time shift’ in fiction. If the fractured time- scheme of Parade’s End sometimes disorientates, it is because Ford is reconstructing the experience of disorientation – not only that produced by terror in battle, but by the time-montage of civilian memories superimposing themselves on army life; or war memories haunting survivors afterwards.
In fact, that multiple perspective, looking at the war in terms of the present – the plunge into the abyss – the past – which was supposed to be gradually progressing – and imagined and real futures – is a feature of much of the greatest war writing. Malcolm Bradbury, describing how postwar modernism ‘had to cast itself in the form of modern irony before it could begin to recover itself as myth’, noted:
this is apparent in many of the great twentieth-century works that were actually written across the war: Joyce’s Ulysses and Kafka’s The Trial, Forster’s A Passage to India and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.8
All these works were ‘written across the war’ in that the time of their composition spanned from prewar to wartime, or wartime to postwar, or both. But there is another sense in which Parade’s End, like these other works, is ‘written across the war’. They all reach back across the gulf that the war appeared to have torn open in the fabric of time, towards what Ford called ‘The World before the War’.9 The same could be said of Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920); Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927); Musil’s, The Man without Qualities (published from 1930). This sense of writing across the war, even when not writing directly about it, is the condition of postwar modernism, which seeks to understand how civilization and progress led to devastation and murderousness. To do this involves a recuperative project: to
