'Speak of It Never; Think of It Always'

A Man Could Stand Up--, the third novel in the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28), renders the day the Armistice was signed not as unambiguous celebration, though Ford dutifully reports the fireworks and the roaring crowds in London. He also documents moments of shell-shocked silence among his characters. Valentine Wannop, a school teacher and the love interest of Christopher Tietjens, a veteran of the Western Front, has left a celebratory mob on the evening of Nov. 11, 1918:

“Coming into the square was like being suddenly dead, it was so silent and so still to one so lately jostled by the innumerable crowd and deafened by unceasing shouts. The shouting had continued for so long that it had assumed the appearance of being a solid and unvarying thing, like life. So the silence appeared like Death; and now she had death in her heart.”

 In 1915 at age forty-two, Ford had enlisted in the Welch Regiment. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory and hearing loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. In September 1916, Ford wrote to Joseph Conrad (ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 1965):

“Emotions again: I saw two men and three mules (the first time I saw a casualty) killed by one shell. A piece the size of a pair of corsets went clear thro’ one man, the other just fell—the mules hardly any visible mark. These things gave me no emotion at all—they seemed obvious; rather as it wd. be.”

Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed in England, training troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged on Jan. 7, 1919.

Valentine reunites with Tietjens at last, despite war and the plotting of others in their lives. The novel ends with a poignantly graceless dance: “They were prancing. The whole world round them was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of unending roaring circles.” The final passage – with Tietjens, the battered Tory gentleman, as an elephant – ends mid-sentence, inconclusively: “On an elephant. A dear meal-sack elephant. She was setting out on . . .” One of the great non-concluding conclusions in modern literature.

I suggest interested readers find War Prose (Carcanet, 1999), edited by Max Saunders, author of a two-volume biography of Ford. It collects reminiscences, fiction, prefaces and miscellaneous material Ford wrote during and after the war. The final selection, from a previously unpublished manuscript in the archive at Cornell, was written in 1929.  Ford describes a commemorative tablet on a column in Notre-Dame de Paris.

“And that, as far as I know, is the only memorial in Paris, which is in the heart of France, to all those million who died and to all the labours and heart searching of the six or seven million of the rest of us who did not die but suffered ‘for the most part in France.’”

Ford says it is “good that that memorial should be obscure and little and pretty and mostly ignored. Because, if it were an immense, vainglorious mass of stone, it would be less a symbol of the better world that those deaths and those unchronicled heart-searchings and sufferings have given us.”

Finally, Ford quotes Léon Michel Gambetta (1838-82), who led the defense of France against Prussia in 1870: “N’en parlez jamais; pensez y toujours.” [“Speak of it never; think of it always.”]