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6 war prose himself, that I never really noticed the shelling at all except that I was covered with tins of sardines & things that had been put out for our dinner. That was really the worst of the Front from the novelist’s point of view. One was always so busy with one’s immediate job that one had no time to notice one’s sensations or anything else that went on round one. H. G. [Wells] wd. no doubt do it very much better!7 The novelist of perplexity and displaced sensation was particularly suited to presenting this psychology of battle, in which the obtuseness and subliminal noticings of the protagonist become an index to the mental strain he is under. He told Conrad: ‘I have been for six weeks – with the exception of only 24 hours – continuously within reach of German missiles &, altho’ one gets absolutely to ignore them, consciously, I imagine that subconsciously one is suffering.’ The second letter describes his attempt to buy flypapers in a shop while a shell lands nearby, and the Tommies joke as if the noise was made by the flies. ‘No interruption, emotion, vexed at getting no flypapers,’ writes Ford: ‘Subconscious emotion, “thank God the damn thing’s burst”.’ Despite all this, he could say with strangely detached irony: ‘It is curious – but, in the evenings here, I always feel myself happier that I have ever felt in my life.’ It is indeed curious that he can say this in a letter beginning ‘I wrote these rather hurried notes yesterday because we were being shelled to hell & I did not expect to get thro’ the night.’ It was, as often, a sense of death’s imminence that made him want to go on writing: a paradox he addresses in the third letter to his former collaborator: I wonder if it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record. I hope it is, rather, the annalist’s wish to help the historian – or, in a humble sort of way, my desire to help you, cher maître! – if you ever wanted to do anything in ‘this line’. Of course you wd. not ever want to do anything in this line – but a pocketful of coins in a foreign country may sometimes come in handy. You might want to put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to 7 Ford to Stella Bowen, 22 Nov. 1918: The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 40.
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introduction 7 Bécourt. There you wd. be! And I, to that extent, shd. once more have collaborated.8 Violet Hunt, with whom Ford had been living before the war, sent him the proofs of her latest novel, Their Lives. He wrote the brief preface (included here), signed with a bitter, ironic anonymity ‘Miles Ignotus’ (‘The Unknown Soldier’), in which he described reading them on a hillside watching the Germans shelling Belgian civilians in Poperinghe. It seemed an example of senseless Prussian cruelty, and is described as such in the passage in No More Parades where the protagonist Christopher Tietjens recalls having watched the same sight. There, as in Ford’s other description of the scene – in No Enemy – he records a disturbing conflict between a kind of aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle, and the thought of the human suffering it represented.9 There was also a feeling of joy at the sight of allied shells bursting over the German trenches. This volatile emotional mix of awe, pity, excitement and outrage recurs in his war prose, particularly in the most significant piece he wrote while on the Western Front: the essay ‘A Day of Battle’, dated 15 September 1916, and also signed ‘Miles Ignotus’. Always an intense reader, Ford also managed to spend some of ‘the eternal waiting that is War’ reading. He reread the authors who had meant most to him: Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant, Anatole France, and his friends Henry James, W.H. Hudson, Conrad and Stephen Crane. He never forgot the moment of disorientation produced by The Red Badge of Courage: ‘having to put the book down and go out of my tent at dawn,’ he remembered, ‘I could not understand why the men I saw about were in khaki’ rather than the blue or grey of the American Civil War; ‘the impression was so strong that its visualization of war completely superimposed itself for long hours over the concrete objects of the war I was in’. Rereading James gave him the same disorientating feeling of double vision.10 In the companion piece to ‘A Day of Battle’, ‘The Enemy’, he gives another instance of this double vision, and how important it was to his activity as a novelist. He recounts a near-death experience, when shot at by a sniper. He imagines the German, then 8 Letters, pp. 75–6. 9 No More Parades (London, 1925), pp. 308–10 . No Enemy (New York, 1929), pp. 82–7. 10 Return to Yesterday (London, 1931), p. 49; New York Essays (New York, 1927), p. 30; ‘Literary Causeries: IV: Escape.....’, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine (Paris) (9 March 1924), pp. 3, 11.

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war prose himself, that I never really noticed the shelling at all except that I was covered with tins of sardines & things that had been put out for our dinner.

That was really the worst of the Front from the novelist’s point of view. One was always so busy with one’s immediate job that one had no time to notice one’s sensations or anything else that went on round one. H. G. [Wells] wd. no doubt do it very much better!7

The novelist of perplexity and displaced sensation was particularly suited to presenting this psychology of battle, in which the obtuseness and subliminal noticings of the protagonist become an index to the mental strain he is under. He told Conrad: ‘I have been for six weeks – with the exception of only 24 hours – continuously within reach of German missiles &, altho’ one gets absolutely to ignore them, consciously, I imagine that subconsciously one is suffering.’ The second letter describes his attempt to buy flypapers in a shop while a shell lands nearby, and the Tommies joke as if the noise was made by the flies. ‘No interruption, emotion, vexed at getting no flypapers,’ writes Ford: ‘Subconscious emotion, “thank God the damn thing’s burst”.’

Despite all this, he could say with strangely detached irony: ‘It is curious – but, in the evenings here, I always feel myself happier that I have ever felt in my life.’ It is indeed curious that he can say this in a letter beginning ‘I wrote these rather hurried notes yesterday because we were being shelled to hell & I did not expect to get thro’ the night.’ It was, as often, a sense of death’s imminence that made him want to go on writing: a paradox he addresses in the third letter to his former collaborator:

I wonder if it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record. I hope it is, rather, the annalist’s wish to help the historian – or, in a humble sort of way, my desire to help you, cher maître! – if you ever wanted to do anything in ‘this line’. Of course you wd. not ever want to do anything in this line – but a pocketful of coins in a foreign country may sometimes come in handy. You might want to put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to

7 Ford to Stella Bowen, 22 Nov. 1918: The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella

Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 40.

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