An anti-war book with grim b&w photographs of wartime atrocities with gallows humor/sarcastic captions.

    The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war." Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman -- "the last English Tory"--and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife, Sylvia. A work of truly amazing subtlety and profundity, Parade's End affirms Graham Greene's prediction: "There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford."

    Like his creator, Laurence Stallings, Richard Plume is a U.S. Marine whose combat injuries ultimately cost him a leg and much faith in his government and society. Carefully structured to emphasize the immediacy of problems faced by its players, the novel relegates combat scenes to flashbacks and centers instead on the struggles Richard faces as he tries to carve out a humble but honest existence in postwar Washington, D.C., for his wife, Esme, and son, Dickie. As he struggles to understand the external and internal causes that made him a victim, he turns to his heritage. Patriotic Plumes men fought in every American conflict from Valley Forge onward, and while all returned with wounds and woes, none ever doubted that battlefield glory was worth the price-none until Richard, who yearns to spare Dickie from the fate of his forebears.