A Man Could Stand Up ‪—‬

On the morning of the eleventh of November 1918, as the bells and the crowds begin to sound the end of the war, Valentine Wannop — a young schoolteacher and pacifist who has not heard from the man she loves in more than a year — is at her work in London when word comes that Christopher Tietjens is back in England and needs her.

From that morning the novel carries us into the trenches earlier in 1918, where Tietjens — the upright, much-wronged Tory gentleman at the heart of Parade's End — holds himself and his men together under bombardment, turning over in a mind nearly broken by the war the question of what a life worth living might still look like. For the soldiers, peace means one exact thing: that a man could stand up on a hill, in the open, and not be shot.

The third novel of Ford Madox Ford's great modernist tetralogy — after Some Do Not… and No More Parades, and before Last Post — A Man Could Stand Up — is the volume in which the long story turns toward the light. Told in the looping, impressionist time-shift Ford perfected, moving between the schoolroom and the trench and rendering war from inside a strained living mind, it closes on Armistice night with Christopher and Valentine, after years of longing and obstruction, finally together — claiming, out of the ruin of the old world, the bare possibility of an upright and ordinary life.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1926 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword on the book's place in Parade's End and its technique, a biographical note on Ford Madox Ford, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.