No More Parades

Set in the mud and madness of Rouen in 1917, No More Parades follows Christopher Tietjens, a captain of old England, through the final hours before his unit goes to the front. Tietjens is a man of formidable intellect and quiet integrity trapped in a world that has declared war on everything he represents. His wife Sylvia, beautiful and utterly merciless, has pursued him to the war zone to continue the psychological warfare she wields with devastating precision. Above them both broods General Campion, Tietjens' godfather and commanding officer, a man whose jealous cruelty knows no bounds. Ford Madox Ford renders the absurdity of command, the grinding tedium between shellfire, and the moral corrosion of a society consuming its own best men with terrifying clarity. This is not a novel of battles but of the small violences that add up: the humiliations, the betrayals, the thousand ways decent people are broken by systems designed by cowards. A masterpiece of psychological realism and modernist innovation, No More Parades asks what remains of honor when the country that extolled it has become unrecognizable.