He had stood at the hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds... He had turned and walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:

"It's perhaps too... untidy..."

She had said:

"Yes! Yes... Ugly... Too... oh... private!"

He said, he remembered:

"But... for ever..."

 She said, in a great hurry:

"But when you come back... Permanently. And... oh, as if it were in public." ... "I don't know," she had added. "Ought we?... I'd be ready..." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."

'There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.'
W.H.Auden, 1961

Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which, in Graham Greene's words, tell 'the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife'. He wanted to see the book printed in one volume: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925) and A Man Could Stand Up (1926), with his afterthought, The Last Post (1928).

Christopher Tietjens is the last of a breed, the Tory gentleman, which the Great War, a savage marriage to Sylvia, and the qualities inherent in his nature, define and unravel. Here the War's attritions offered no escape from domestic witchcraft. Opposite Tietjens is Macmaster, a Scot, different in class and culture, at once friend and foil. Here Ford's art and his human vision achieve their greatest complexity and subtlety.

With an afterword by Gerald Hammond
Gerald Hammond is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, author of The Making of the English Bible, Fleeting Things and other critical volumes and editor of the Selected Poems of John Skelton and of Richard Lovelace in the FyfieldBooks series.

This volume is part of The Millennium Ford project which aims to bring all the major writings of this great writer back into circulation.