No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford [best ereader for pdf TXT] 📗

No More Parades

By Ford Madox Ford.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint To William Bird No More Parades Part I I II III IV Part II I II Part III I II Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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To William Bird

My dear Bird⁠—

I have always held⁠—and I hold as strongly now as ever⁠—that a novel should have no preface. It should have no preface for aesthetico-moral reasons, and because prefatory matter takes away from the reality of, and therefore damages, a book. A dedicatory letter is subterfuge. That subterfuge I feel forced to adopt, and must take the consequences.

The reason is this: All novels are historical, but all novels do not deal with such events as get on to the pages of history. This No More Parades does. It becomes, therefore, necessary to delimit what, in it, is offered as, on the author’s responsibility, observed event.

State, underline and emphasize the fact how you will it is impossible to get into the heads of even intelligent public critics the fact that the opinions of a novelist’s characters as stated in any novel are not of necessity the opinions of the novelist. It cannot be done. How it may be with one’s public one has no means of knowing. Perhaps they read one with more generosity and care. Presumably they do, for they have either spent money on, or taken some trouble to obtain, the volume.

In this novel the events, such as it treats of, are vouched for by myself. There was in France, at the time covered by this novel, an immense base camp, unbelievably crowded with men whom we were engaged in getting up the line, working sometimes day and night in the effort. That immense army was also extremely depressed by the idea that those who controlled it overseas would⁠—I will not use the word “betray,” since that implies volition⁠—but “let us down.” We were oppressed, ordered, counter-ordered, commanded, countermanded, harassed, strafed, denounced⁠—and, above all, dreadfully worried. The never-ending sense of worry, in fact, far surpassed any of the “exigencies of troops actually in contact with enemy forces,” and that applied not merely to the bases, but to the whole field of military operations. Unceasing worry!

We took it out in what may or may not have been unjust suspicions of the all-powerful ones who had our lives in their hands⁠—and seemed indifferent enough to the fact. So this novel recounts what those opinions were: it does not profess to dictate whether those opinions were or were not justified. There is, I think, not one word in it which records any opinions or words of mine as being my words or opinions. I believe I may say that, as to the greater part of such public matters as are here discussed, I have no opinions at all. After seven or eight years I have been unable to form any. I present therefore only what I observed or heard.

Few writers can have engaged themselves as combatants in what, please God, will yet prove to be the war that ended war, without the intention of aiding with their writings, if they survived, in bringing about such a state of mind as should end wars as possibilities.

This obviously is a delicate task. If you overstate horrors you induce in your reader a state of mind such as, by reaction, causes the horrors to become matters of indifference. If you overstate heroisms you induce indifference to heroisms⁠—of which the late war produced, heaven knows, plenty enough, so that to be indifferent to them is villainy. Casting about, then, for a medium through which to view this spectacle, I thought of a man⁠—by then dead⁠—with whom i had been very intimate and with whom⁠—as with yourself⁠—I had at one time discussed most things under the sun. He was the English Tory.

Even then⁠—it must have been in September, 1916, when I was in a region called the Salient, and I remember the very spot where the idea came to me⁠—I said to myself: “How would all this look in the eyes of X⁠⸺”⁠—already dead, along with all English Tories? For, as a medium through which to view struggles that are after all in the end mostly emotional struggles⁠—since as a rule for every twenty minutes of actual fighting you were alone with your emotions, which, being English, you did not express, for at least a month!⁠—as a medium, what could be better than the sceptical, not ungenerous, not cold, not unconvincible eyes of an extinct frame of mind? For by the time of my relative youth when I knew X⁠⸺ so intimately, Toryism had gone beyond the region of any practising political party. It said for a year or two: “A plague on all your houses,” and so expired.

To this determination⁠—to use my friend’s eyes as a medium⁠—I am adhering in this series of books. Some Do Not⁠ ⁠…⁠—of which this one is not so much a continuation as