SOURCE: "A Diamond of Pattern: The War of F. Madox Ford," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXX, No. 3, Summer, 1962, pp. 464-83.

Gordon was an American author and educator. In the following essay, he offers a structural and thematic overview of No More Parades, the second novel of the Tietjens tetralogy.

How we find any writer is so often a matter of where we first came in—of how we first encountered him, with what expectations and hopes. In the case of Ford Madox Ford there are over sixty wrong places for a first encounter and there is perhaps only one right one, since, as Ford knew, first impressions stick. The beginning reader should probably not begin with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Nor even with "The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage...