'By No Means Fit to Be Spoonmeat for Babes'

“Without question the World War I classic that would rest most comfortably on a shelf hard by the works of Izaak Walton, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton is Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28).” 

That’s David Hein in “The Great Books of the Great War,” published in Modern Age. Hein suggests we reexamine the literature of World War I and the way it has been understood and packaged by critics and teachers: “[W]e discover, as we explore the outstanding literature of this era, that a reading list confined to the canonical texts typically assigned an undergraduate student may be deficient in major respects, too skewed toward wholesale disillusionment, even cynicism—a notion of the futility of everything.” In other words, not every Great War veteran was a nihilist, a proto-Joseph Heller. Hein is especially good on Edmund Blunden and his memoir Undertones of War (1928), Frederic Manning’s novel Her Privates We (1929), and Ford:

 

“Coming out of the First World War, in which he is blown up and shell-shocked during the Battle of the Somme, Ford Madox Ford confronts a blasted religious and ethical landscape. . . . [H]e does not surrender to a feeling of futility but offers a complicated and difficult countercultural alternative. Nearly a hundred years on, his contribution to the literature of the Great War, alongside fine books by others, will repay a conservative’s consideration.”

 

In July 1915, at age forty-two, Ford 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 loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. He was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid.

 

Not surprisingly, the war often figures in Ford’s post-war writing, overtly or tacitly, regardless of subject. While Parade’s End stands as a twentieth-century masterpiece, a supreme work of fiction, his other books deserve closer attention. A third of the way through The March of Literature (1938), in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience:

 

“The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.”

 

Ford’s regiment was given the task of repairing trenches behind the front lines, and he permitted the men to sing while working: “[T]hese heroes made themselves into an informal committee for the revising of all the regiment’s private versions of the British army songs—which are folk ballads by no means fit to be spoonmeat for babes.”