All Else Is Folly. Peregrine Acland
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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 came billowing through the half-open windows of the hotel barroom the singing of a harsh-voiced chorus that rose up, at the end of each verse, to a shout.
* * *
As he lay, helpless, with his back on the bar-room floor, Alexander Falcon damned the face that grinned drunkenly down at him. He damned the reek of whisky which that face, barely twelve inches above his own, breathed into his nostrils. He damned the great hands that held down his shoulders. He damned, with the most extravagant flourishes of his imagination, the knee that dug into the pit of his stomach.
He damned loud. He damned long. And as he cursed, he laughed.
Tum-tum-tumtitum.… Tum-tum-tumtitum.
The beating on the wood floor hammered in his ears.
“The harlots of Jerusalem — the harlots of Jerusalem.”
A score of voices bellowed to the stamping of their heels. Drunken heels. Spurred heels. Stamping on the floor. Up the room and down again. Across the room and back again. All around the bar-room floor.…
Tum-tum-tumtitum.… Tum-tum-tumtitum.
“The harlots of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
The harlots of Jerusalem — the pride of all the na — tions.”
Falcon had a thought; an inspiration. His right leg was free. He lifted his spurred right heel. Swiftly, firmly, hard, he drove the spur into his enemy’s rump.
Rage, anguish, bellowed from the face above. One of the ham-like hands that held Falcon’s shoulders sprang back to console the injured buttock.
Falcon wrenched himself free, leaped to his feet.
“Blast you, Alec!” the other roared as he, too, struggled up. “I’ll rub your nose in the dirt for that. You bastard! You ripped the seat out of my pants.”
Cud Browne, the big bronc’ twister, laughed as he thundered. Laughed at his own plight. A bare-seated Berseker going into battle.
He lunged at Falcon.
But young Falcon, fresh from college in the East, had learned his rough-and-tumble in better places than bar-rooms.
As Cud Browne hurled himself at him, Falcon swung his body from the waist to one side. Left one leg in Cud’s way. Caught him by the back of the shoulders as he stumbled by like a mad bull. Swung him over his hip to the floor.
The cowboys stopped their square dance to cheer.
Falcon stopped scrapping to bow.
One moment too long.
Heels over head he went, back to the floor.
“Cowboys in town! Yip! Yip!” chortled Browne as he bounced his bare buttocks on Falcon’s belly.
“Ugh! Ugh!” grunted Alec.
With Browne’s hand gripping his nose, rubbing the back of his head in a beer puddle, Alexander Falcon meditated on the vanity of lust for adventure. Why wasn’t he at this moment at home, sitting in a large leather chair in a cool corner of his father’s library in the East, reading about the lovers of Oraly in George Moore’s “Memoirs