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10 war prose I wonder what the effect of it will be on us all, after the war – & on national life and the like.16 It was the kind of experience he needed to write about many times: in several of the pieces here; in a letter to Conrad; and in Parade’s End. When he was well enough, he was sent to Lady Michelham’s convalescent hospital at Menton. The opulence of the Riviera was a surreal contrast to the war, and he wrote about his time there too, in the essay ‘I Revisit the Riviera’. In February he left Menton, and took a train to the frozen, snow-covered north. At Rouen he was assigned to a Canadian casual battalion for three weeks, then put in charge of a hospital tent of German prisoners at Abbeville. On the evidence of Parade’s End he found it ‘detestable to him to be in control of the person of another human being – as detestable as it would have been to be himself a prisoner ... that thing that he dreaded most in the world’.17 He was back on leave in London in the spring of 1917. The Medical Board would not pass Ford as fit to return to France, so he was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed at Kinmel Park. He got on well with his new Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel G.R. Powell, whose commendation in Ford’s service record must have gone a long way towards redeeming him from Cooke’s criticisms: Has shown marked aptitude for grasping any intricate subject and possesses great powers of organization – a lecturer of the first water on several military subjects – conducted the duties of housing officer to the unit (average strength 2800) with great ability.18 He was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. Despite the frustrations of army life, and the increasingly fraught meetings with Violet Hunt, the life suited him. He never minded frugal living and hard work. In the spring of 1918 he was attached to the Staff, and told Katharine proudly that he would go ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’: 16 ‘I Revisit the Riviera’, Harper’s, 166 (Dec. 1932), p. 66. Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81-83. 17 A Man Could Stand Up – (London, 1926), pp. 186–7. Other accounts of German prisoners are in Letters, pp. 79–80, ‘War & the Mind’, p. 47 below, and Return to Yesterday, pp. 118–19, 329. 18 Quoted by Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story (London, 1972), p. 296.
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introduction 11 It is in many ways lucky for me as I was passed fit & should have gone out to my Bn. again just the day after I got the order to join the Staff – & my Bn. has been pretty well wiped out since then, so I suppose I shd. have gone west with it.19 He was given the temporary rank of brevet major (meaning extra status without extra pay), and was even offered ‘an after the war post as Educational Advisor to the Northern Command, permanently’, with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. (He considered it, but thought it would stop him writing.) He lectured on the Ross rifle, on ‘the Causes of the War or on any other department of the rag-bag of knowledge that we had to inflict on the unfortunates committed to our charge’. His other topics included ‘Censorship’, ‘War Aims’, ‘Attacks on Strong Points’, ‘Salvage’, ‘Military Law’, ‘Harmonising Rifle Fire’, ‘Cyphers’, ‘Geography and Strategy’, ‘Hospitals’, and – of course – ‘French Civilisation’ – ‘So I must be some sort of Encyclopaedia,’ he said. His fictional alter-ego in Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens, loses his encyclopaedic memory when shellshocked. Clearly Ford was beginning to feel himself again. He had an ‘exhausting and worrying time’ after he was given the task of defending someone in a Court Martial (an experience which would presumably have gone into ‘True Love & a GCM’ had Ford completed it): ‘the wretched man [...] began to go mad last Sunday,’ he wrote, ‘was certified yesterday, and the Court-martial washed out. This morning he rushed into my tent, having escaped from his escort: tried to strangle his father, bit me, and has just been carried off to an asylum’. He added: ‘If there is anything of that sort going I am generally in it!’ In Yorkshire he again found himself in conflict with his new Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Pope, who appears to have been a less conscious satirist than his namesake: My rows with the CO are only funny – not worrying, because he is desperately afraid of me and only speaks to me as it were with his cap in his hand. The last one arose after he had said to me at a dance: ‘Well, H., I suppose now peace is here you are the great man & I am only a worm at your feet.’ And I cordially agreed. The dance, however, lasted to 0400 hours[.]20 19 Ford to Katharine Hueffer, 13 Mar. 1918: Cornell. 20 Ford to Stella Bowen, 22 Aug. 1918; The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, p. 7.

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10

war prose

I wonder what the effect of it will be on us all, after the war – & on national life and the like.16

It was the kind of experience he needed to write about many times: in several of the pieces here; in a letter to Conrad; and in Parade’s End. When he was well enough, he was sent to Lady Michelham’s convalescent hospital at Menton. The opulence of the Riviera was a surreal contrast to the war, and he wrote about his time there too, in the essay ‘I Revisit the Riviera’. In February he left Menton, and took a train to the frozen, snow-covered north. At Rouen he was assigned to a Canadian casual battalion for three weeks, then put in charge of a hospital tent of German prisoners at Abbeville. On the evidence of Parade’s End he found it ‘detestable to him to be in control of the person of another human being – as detestable as it would have been to be himself a prisoner ... that thing that he dreaded most in the world’.17

He was back on leave in London in the spring of 1917. The Medical Board would not pass Ford as fit to return to France, so he was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed at Kinmel Park. He got on well with his new Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel G.R. Powell, whose commendation in Ford’s service record must have gone a long way towards redeeming him from Cooke’s criticisms:

Has shown marked aptitude for grasping any intricate subject and possesses great powers of organization – a lecturer of the first water on several military subjects – conducted the duties of housing officer to the unit (average strength 2800) with great ability.18

He was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. Despite the frustrations of army life, and the increasingly fraught meetings with Violet Hunt, the life suited him. He never minded frugal living and hard work. In the spring of 1918 he was attached to the Staff, and told Katharine proudly that he would go ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’:

16 ‘I Revisit the Riviera’, Harper’s, 166 (Dec. 1932), p. 66. Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 5

Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81-83. 17 A Man Could Stand Up – (London, 1926), pp. 186–7. Other accounts of German prisoners are in Letters, pp. 79–80, ‘War & the Mind’, p. 47 below, and Return to Yesterday, pp. 118–19, 329. 18 Quoted by Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story (London, 1972), p. 296.

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