A Man Could Stand Up—

The third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End sequence unfolds largely on Armistice Day, 1918, as the war ends and its survivors try to imagine ordinary life again. Christopher Tietjens, the honorable, much wronged English gentleman at the heart of the tetralogy, is glimpsed in the trenches under bombardment and then, hours later, in a stripped London flat where the woman he loves waits for him. Ford renders the noise, fear, and strange stillness of the front through a fractured, stream of consciousness style that folds past and present together. Beneath the private drama runs the collapse of an old English order the war has swept away. This free PDF and EPUB edition continues one of the finest fictions of the First World War.