SOURCE: "Tietjens and the Tradition," in The Pacific Spectator, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 1952, pp. 23-32.

In the following essay, Firebaugh contends that Parade's End is best read as an allegory.

Now that the extraordinary tetralogy, Parade's End, has been republished, we ought to reconsider it in the light of the message which Ford Madox Ford meant it to convey. For he did intend the "Tietjens Saga" to teach a lesson, although he was too much a product of his post-pre-Raphaelite times not to feel that he sinned against his literary gods by that intention. The meaning of the novels, however, is so much richer than his avowed purpose of denouncing warfare that he can have offended only the most dogmatic worshipers of artistic purposelessness.

The Tietjens cycle deals with the second decade of this century as those years were lived by Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory." It is of...