No More Parades

Ford Madox Ford’s second Parade’s End novel drops Christopher Tietjens into a base camp behind the Western Front, where he oversees drafts of men bound for the trenches while shells fall and the machinery of war grinds on around him. The chaos of the depot is matched by the chaos in his private life when his estranged wife Sylvia arrives to torment him. Ford renders the pressure of command, exhaustion, and moral endurance through a shifting, interior style that puts the reader inside a mind close to breaking. It stands among the finest English fiction of the First World War. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings the 1925 novel to readers at no cost.