ABSTRACT
Ford Madox occupied a distinctive and often ambivalent national, literary and intellectual position in response to the First World War. Ford was a British subject with German ancestry, still known during the war as Ford Madox Hueffer, which made him a target for heightened scrutiny; he was also a committed Francophile. Ford's writing about the First World War is consistently out of step with popular narratives and representations. He does not get caught up in patriotic fervour in the early part of the war, either in poetry or propaganda. Ford, the elder statesman with a wealth of literary experience, was able to use his experience of and response to the war to make his own previous style new. The war is commemorated in Parade's End by silence, by the inability to hear, by the inability to speak, or by the inability to interpret sounds.
