SOURCE: "Retrospect II: Fiction," in Heroes' Twilight, second edition, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980, pp. 171-97.

In the following excerpt Bergonzi discusses the effects of World War I as presented in Parade's End.

Parde's End is a trilogy or a tetralogy, depending on whether one accepts the final volume, Last Post, as an integral part of the total design. The first section, Some Do Not, came out in 1924, No More Parades in 1925, and A Man Could Stand Up in 1926. Last Post appeared in 1928; it seems that Ford wrote it because of the importunate desire of a woman friend to know what happened to his characters, and a few years later he virtually disowned it, saying that if the work was ever to appear in a single volume he would like it to do so as a trilogy. In fact, the one-volume American edition of 1950 included all four volumes; the...