In histories of the First World War, and the commemorations that have followed, 4 August 1914 and 11 November 1918 have become iconic. The beginning and end dates of conflicts often stand, in retrospective analyses, for rupture from a belle époque and a new start respectively. Life continues during war, but its outbreak portends a dramatic change of state: in practical terms energy must be devoted to mobilising and providing for the disparate needs of military services; rules tend to be tightened and behaviour policed more assiduously, socially or by legislation. The dramatic jolt to the systems by which our lives are usually regulated means that time itself is experienced differently, a more febrile and uneven entity than its spatialised peacetime counterpart; recent critics such as Mary L. Dudziak and Mary A. Favret have begun to theorise a modern ‘wartime’. The Armistice finally allows reflection and relief, the beginning of the reintegration of military and associated personnel, and the slow process of the long-desired return to ‘normality’. In literary and historical accounts, dates of beginning and ending often become palimpsests on to which wartime experiences can be written, conduits for preceding or resultant narratives of historical change. Modernist literature is particularly interested in its relationship with time, negotiating between the ongoing global rationalisation and standardisation of time, and the scientific and philosophical work which sought to re-inscribe its complexity. In Ford Madox Ford’s Great War tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–8) the beginning and end of the First World War haunt the novels, but Ford refuses to allow the war to be parenthesised neatly. Just as important are the date in July 1912 on which the narrative begins, and the world after the war that we see in the final volume. In this chapter I use recent theories of wartime to analyse the function and representation of time in Parade’s End, arguing that seeing the war in terms of both its continuities and ruptures enables us to understand the ways in which the conditions for war are created, and the enduring impact of armed conflict.
Modern Time
Time itself was being re-ordered through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As railway track spread through Britain, so the tracks of time needed to be aligned. Ford was acutely aware of the development of the railway, even beginning his study of The English Novel (1930) with an account of the move from the country to the city, and the increasing atomisation of communities resulting from locomotion.1 Greenwich Mean Time was taken up by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and legally adopted in Great Britain in 1880.2 The development of railways across the world led to demand for the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC from 1 to 22 October 1884.3 The recommendations of that meeting took several decades to play out: the Bureau International de l’Heure (International Time Bureau) was created in 1913 to regulate national measurements of universal time, but many countries were yet to legislate standard time as official practice. Regulation of the international status of the bureau was delayed by the First World War.4 The war directly impacted the management of time: in Britain, for example, the 1916 Summer Time Act introduced daylight saving for the first time, while the British and Allied armed forces adopted the 24-hour clock gradually throughout the war. Ford points to the problems of enacting such changes in Parade’s End: ‘“Ho!” says our Staff, “they are going to attack in force at such an hour ackemma,” because naturally the staff thought in terms of ackemma years after the twenty-four-hour day had been established.’5 This tacit criticism of the military for its slow implementation of processes points to the slow pace of change when people’s ingrained habits are a factor, both conceptually and practically. Legislation often precedes social and cultural change, and legally the measurement of time was more connected than ever globally, but more abstract in its relationship with the physical world.6
Literature, particularly modernist literature, tended to follow the lead of philosophy by setting consciousness and memory against the brute mechanics of standardised time. Michael Levenson, Stephen Kern and Tim Armstrong, among others, have described what Charles Tung calls the ‘obsessive thematization of time—its movement into the spotlight from the quiet background for plot or the “invisible medium” of history’.7 The ground-breaking work of scientists such as Albert Einstein and Henri Poincaré quickly permeated the public consciousness, as Michael Whitworth has described,8 while the solar eclipse experiment that proved Einstein’s theory was being organised by A. S. Eddington in the last year of the war. In philosophy, the end of the decade that included the International Meridian Conference saw the publication of Henri Bergson’s thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) and William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). Both saw time as an affective experience in which duration varied. Such work, recent critics argue, must be understood historically in the context of the standardisation of time.9 Mary Ann Gillies, a leading writer on Bergson and modernism, argues that ‘because of their radical challenge to traditional temporal concepts, they were central to the reconfigurations of culture carried out by modernists’.10 Bergson was prominent in England before the First World War: that thesis was translated as Time and Free Will (1910), and his ideas were widely disseminated in the popular press.11 Among the modernist network, Bertrand Russell championed Bergson, and T. E. Hulme published several letters and articles on him in The New Age from 1909 to 1912.12 James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are paradigmatic examples of the ways in which Bergsonian models gave authors new ways to write time following the First World War, as they struggled to describe and understand the visceral experience of the conflict and its long-term impact.
Ford was early to use this method to represent the war. He attended the Tuesday evening discussions hosted by Hulme in 1912–13, which makes it probable that he was cognisant of Bergson’s work and its importance.13 The time shifts of Parade’s End follow, for the most part, the thoughts and memories of Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia, his older brother Mark, his protégé Vincent Macmaster, and Valentine Wannop, who becomes his mistress and, later, partner.14 In his reminiscence of Joseph Conrad, Ford wrote that:
The novels are acutely conscious of their historical moment as one of change, and working back and forth over the past is vital in writing and rewriting history. Adam Barrows argues that ‘For Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, standard time’s uniform grid degrades and disenfranchises more meaningful temporal configurations and social linkages in the interests of empire and commerce’.16 Ford, a collaborator of Conrad and very much a modernist writer in the same way as these figures, might also usefully be considered in the light of this argument. In Parade’s End we see the difficulties caused by trying to resist this and other processes of bureaucratic rationalisation, and the limited possibilities available to do so.what was the matter with the novel, and the British Novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straight forward. To get … a man in function you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past.15
A parallel narrative development is the increasing mnemonic function of specific dates and historical events.17 These become markers of epochal change onto which symbolic meaning is retrospectively loaded: the experience of rapid development in the period, along with the corollary interest in narratives of decline and disenchantment,18 meant that lines in the sand were and are sought. For many the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 signalled the end of an era, conveniently at the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf looked to December 1910, while the appearance in 1913 of works such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring seemed to herald a new age.19 Others have looked to the modernist annus mirabilis of 1922, the General Strike of 1926, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, or the Nazi gains in the German election of 1930. The beginning and end of the First World War, often referred to as the Great War in contemporary accounts, seemed to provide clear demarcation, along with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Mary L. Dudziak argues that ‘War also breaks time into pieces, slicing human experience into eras, creating a before and an after’,20 while Mary A. Favret puts it succinctly: ‘Periodization flourishes within w...