Major Acland’s Falcon would eventually very gladly — but like all of us, how vainly! — have applied for a Staff Job; have been sent home to Canada to train details — with young woman for the use of officer, one, complete.… Then when he is worn and wearied out he is put into the most hellish scrap of all. And gets his Blighty.…
But with his bashed in face and mangled limbs his young woman who also is wearied out turns him down and back he goes to Canada — and presumably carries on.
Nevertheless, at the skirl of the pipes: “War-lust again surged through him.” As it does for us all. And that really is the lesson of the book — the lesson that our publics and lawmakers would do well to ponder. “Yet now,” Major Acland concludes, “with the skirling of the pipes in his ears, he would have signed away his liberty, his life, for another war. It wouldn’t have mattered much what the war was about.… Not when this vast hall rocked with the tread of two thousand feet and his hot blood leaped to the pipes.…”
I have, myself, by coincidence, felt much the same in Montreal when Major Acland’s kilted regiment went by on the street. For the matter of that I felt much the same on the yesterday of this writing when the 165th regiment of United States Infantry went past the Public Library on Fifth Avenue with the equivalent for the King’s Colours and the other colours flying and the band playing for St. Patrick’s day in the morning.… Of course not quite the same feeling.…
Towards the end Major Acland’s book works up to a very great — a very fine — poignancy of feeling. I imagine that, as a relatively senior officer but a quite junior writer, much as we did during the war, he picked up knowledge of how to handle things as he went along. But I don’t of course know. It is, I mean, difficult to say whether the relatively jejune effect of the rendering of English Country house life and women is caused just by timidity of handling or whether it is a masterly compte rendu of how a young Colonial (Pardon the word, Major, but there is no other adjective.… You can’t write Dominional) footslogging, second loot with bare and hairy knees would feel on introduction to a rather vanished Smart Set.… In any case the effect is the same and the information is very valuable.
Major Acland’s is, I imagine, the first really authentic work of imaginative writing dealing with the war to come out of one of the great British Dominions and if I were any sort of publicist I should make a great deal out of that. But I am not, so I don’t. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the war of the future, if there is to be one, will pivot round the great British Dominions and, whether to our own country or to individuals desirous to be responsible for turning lately allied nations into those enemy to our own, ALL ELSE IS FOLLY should present a great deal of food for thought — and for misgiving. For it is a work that is a singularly reliable subjectivization of that matter.
In it you see, really wonderfully rendered, the admirable Canadians going through their jobs, with stoicism, without apparent enthusiasm, with orderliness, discipline — and with what endurance! I saw a good deal of the Canadians in France and liked them really more than any other troops, my own battalion naturally excepted. And I am really in a position to say that Major Acland’s rendering is by no means laudatorily coloured.…
And how admirably it is all done.… When I read of the marching and fighting towards the end of the book, I feel on my skin the keen air of the early mornings standing to, I have in my mouth the dusky tastes, in my eyes the dusky landscapes, in my ears the sounds that were silences interrupted by clickings of metal on metal that at any moment might rise to the infernal clamour of all Armageddon.… Yes, indeed, one lives it all again, with the fear, and the nausea … and the surprised relief to find oneself still alive. I wish I could have done it as well myself: envy, you see, will come creeping in. But since I couldn’t, the next best thing seems to me to be to say that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely. And that is the truth.
Ford Madox Ford
author’s note
ALL ELSE IS FOLLY was first written nearly two years ago. It has been rewritten several times since. Even after Mr. Ford wrote his generous preface, the entire book was again revised, several considerable parts of it were completely re-written, and some important, although brief, additions were made.
Peregrine Acland
New York City
October 23rd, 1929
Out in western Canada, in the days before the war, there was no sweeter sound to Falcon than the music made by twenty score of horses’ hooves as they rhythmically thudded on the soft and sandy soil. Then he, rising and falling in his saddle as he rode behind the horses, would swirl his long lass’ rope until the knotted end flicked the rearmost of those rounded rumps and stung them to a good, sharp trot. Day after day they trotted, a long line of horses following the wagons as these moved about on the roundup … day after day under blue skies and a sun that scorched even Falcon’s leathery face as he, rising and falling in his saddle, sniffed the smell of hot saddle-leather … while the white dust that was kicked up by the horses choked his nostrils.
Often they passed old, dried-up buffalo-wallows, and he thought of the age that had passed. And sometimes he saw far off, the slowly rising arms of the big black cranes that were working on the irrigation ditch that would one day run right through the middle of the ranch and that would turn that quarter of a million acres of yellow grass and grey alkali into a thousand farms where binders would clack through the tall wheat. And he thought of the age that was passing.…
It made him sad, with the sort of sadness that a young man feels who is so strong and so healthy that he is sorry for all things that aren’t as live and vigorous as he. It was good, riding there, to feel the pony pulsing hard between his knees…. It was good, swinging his rope.… It was good, as the twilight fell on the endless yellow meadows, to drive the long string of horses down some narrow trail that wound through a rocky coulee, down to the broad, brown sweep of the river … a long line of horses trotting to the tinkle of the lead-horse’s bell.
The ranch where Falcon was wrangling horses, that summer when the war broke out, was in Southern Alberta, just north of the little cow-town of Whoopee. Falcon was in Whoopee the night when he heard about the war.
The town was a long street of wooden houses that looked like giant packing boxes tumbled out in a row. The packing-boxes faced on the rusted rails of a bankrupt railroad — one of those monuments to private enterprise which embody a long tale of courage, initiative and graft.
While it was unquestionable that no action in the life of that railroad so befitted it as its death, nevertheless, even as the worst scoundrel may leave a sorely bereaved widow who weeps for her lost supporter, so the defunct railroad left a sorely bereaved town. The “City of Whoopee,” as it dared to call itself in the too early day of its glory, was cut off from the outside world when the last train puffed away down the tracks of the Whoopee and Big Jaw Railroad. With the railroad went the telegraph operator. Telephones were a luxury as yet unknown even to the most opulent citizen of Whoopee. And with the decline of transportation and communication came the collapse of industry and commerce.
Half the packing boxes were empty on this particular evening. Yet although the town was — or at least at the time seemed — moribund, there was one institution in it that was not merely an unconscionable time a-dying, but that still showed signs of a robustious activity. This institution could be found — and regularly was found every evening by visitors from the neighbouring ranches — beneath a sign which read:
“HOTEL WHOOPEE — MIKE MURPHY, PROP.”
On this August evening, as the sun plunged its bloated purple face into the coolness of night, there
