A Man Could Stand Up—
By Ford Madox Ford.
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To
Gerald Duckworth
My dear Duckworth,
Permit me to address to you this Epistle Dedicatory, for without you the series of books of which this is the third and penultimate, could not have existed. We have been working together for a great number of years now and always without a cloud on our relationships. At any rate there has never been a cloud on my half of the landscape.
I fancy that you at least know how much I dislike not letting a book go merely as a book; but it appears that if one has the misfortune to be impelled to treat of public matters that is impossible. So let me here repeat: As far as I am privately concerned these books, like all my others, constitute an attempt simply to reflect—not in the least to reflect on—our own times.
Nevertheless as far as this particular book is concerned I find myself ready to admit to certain public aims. That is to say that, in it, I have been trying to say to as much of humanity as I can reach, and, in particular to such members of the public as, because of age or for other reasons did not experience the shocks and anxieties of the late struggle:
“This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organised, scientific type affects the mind. If, for reasons of gain or, as is still more likely out of dislike for collective types other than your own, you choose to permit your rulers to embark on another war, this—or something very accentuated along similar lines—is what you will have to put up with!”
I hope, in fact, that this series of books, for what it is worth, may make war seem undesirable. But in spite of that hope I have not exaggerated either the physical horrors or the mental distresses of that period. On the contrary I have selected for treatment less horrible episodes than I might well have rendered and I have rendered them with more equanimity than might well have been displayed. You see here the end of the war of attrition through the eyes of a fairly stolid, fairly well-instructed man. I should like to add that, like all of us, he is neither unprejudiced nor infallible. And you have here his mental reactions and his reflections—which are not, not, not presented as those of the author.
The hostilities in which he takes part are those of a period of relative calm. For it should be remembered that great battles, taking months and months to prepare and to recover from, were of relatively rare occurence. The heavy strain of the trenches came from the waiting for long periods of inaction, in great—in mortal—danger every minute of the day and night.
The fighting here projected is just fighting, as you might say at any old time: it is not specifically, say, the battle of the 21st of March, 1918, or any particular one of the series of combats after the 9th of April, of that year.
Finally I have to repeat that, with the exception of the central figure—as to whose Toryism I had my say in the preface to the last-published book of this series!—I have most carefully avoided so much as adumbrating the characteristics—and certainly the vicissitudes—of any human being known to myself.
And, in the meantime, my dear Duckworth, let me say that I shall always describe and subscribe, myself as
A Man Could Stand Up—
Part I
I
Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago it had used to have—of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny.
The telephone, for some ingeniously torturing reason was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection and, called imperatively, at a moment of considerable suspense, out of the asphalte playground where, under her command ranks of girls had stood electrically only just within the margin of control, Valentine with the receiver at her ear was plunged immediately into incomprehensible news uttered by a voice that she seemed half to remember. Right in the middle of a sentence it hit her:
“… that he ought presumably to be under control, which you mightn’t like!”; after that the noise burst out again and rendered the voice inaudible.
It occurred to her that probably at that minute the whole population of the world needed to be under control; she knew she herself did. But she had
