SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman, Wesleyan University Press, 1964, pp. 112-74.

In the following excerpt, Ohmann compares Parade's End with The Good Soldier.

More obviously than The Good Soldier, the four novels Some Do Not … (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up— (1926) and The Last Post (1928)—all republished in the United States in 1950 as Parade's End—are the culmination of Ford's efforts to record and to evaluate the life of his times. In their breadth of scene and their length, these novels are reminiscent of Victorian and Edwardian social realism. They present a picture of England, particularly of upper-class England, on the brink of World War I, in the trenches of the Western Front, and in the uneasy peace that followed the Treaty of Versailles.

Parade's End covers a more ambitious range of affairs than The Good Soldier, and it is a...