Toward the end of 1922, at the home of the poet Harold Monro, Ford Madox Ford began the work that became a modern classic, Parade’s End. In this house at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a Mediterranean peninsula between Nice and Monaco, Ford started to mull over a major project about the First World War. Writing began in earnest early the following year, and the first volume, Some Do Not . . . , was published in 1924. In 1928 appeared the fourth and final book in the series, The Last Post. A bolder undertaking than Ford’s other famous novel, The Good Soldier (1915), this tetralogy was heralded as one of the best fictional treatments to come out of the cataclysm of 1914–18. The critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury calls it “the greatest modern war novel from a British writer.”
Like other modernist works of the era, Parade’s End takes up as themes disillusionment with the past and the turn away from old authorities and enfeebled traditions toward a new, though not necessarily better, future. But unlike other novels in the Great War canon, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), Parade’s End goes beyond dismay at the origins, pursuit, and effects of the war to incorporate a leitmotif of ethical inquiry, even—in the face of this pervasive sense of the spent value of all established norms and institutions—of moral affirmation. The unfolding of