Mrs. Tietjens's View of War

Sylvia Tietjens is one of the most consistenly annoying literary characters I've ever run into since I checked out my first book at the Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.  She is however, viciously insightful at times.

If her name does not ring a bell,  let me give her a little  introduction.  Sylvia is married to Christopher Tiejens, a serving British officer and the central character of Ford Maddox Ford's four-part World War I-based masterpiece Parade's End. Sylvia is a beautiful socialite who marries statistician Christopher Tietjens before the war because she is pregnant—although not necessarily with his child. She is selfish, manipulative, and cruel, yet also mesmerizing. Forever restless, Sylvia enjoys a stream of affairs, but she is secretly hurt by the fact that Christopher does not seem to notice her adulteries.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Christopher and Rebecca Hall (Perfectly Cast) as Sylvia in the BBC Production of
Parade's End

In this excerpt the author Ford opens up Sylvia's cranium and exposes her opinion of the nasty events distracting all her friends and her husband, Christopher.

The whole of this affair [the war], the more she saw of it, overwhelmed her with a sense of hatred... And of depression!... She saw Christopher buried in this welter of fools, playing a schoolboy's game of make-believe. But of a make-believe that was infinitely formidable and infinitely sinister... The crashing of the gun and of all the instruments for making noise seemed to her so atrocious and odious because they were, for her, the silly pomp of a schoolboy-man's game...Campion, or some similar schoolboy, said: 'Hullo! Some German airplanes about...That lets us out on the air-gun! Let's have some pops!'... As they fire guns in the park on the King's birthday. It was sheer insolence to have a gun in the garden of an hotel where people of quality might be sleeping or wishing to converse!

At home she had been able to sustain the conviction that it was such a game... Anywhere: at the house of a minister of the Crown, at dinner, she had only to say: 'Do let us leave off talking of these odious things...' And immediately there would be ten or a dozen voices, the minister's included, to agree with Mrs Tietjens of Groby that they had altogether too much of it...

But here!... She seemed to be in the very belly of the ugly affair... It moved and moved, under your eyes dissolving, yet always there. As if you should try to follow one diamond of pattern in the coil of an immense snake that was in irrevocable motion... It gave her a sense of despair: the engrossment of Tietjens, in common with the engrossment of this disreputable toper. She had never seen Tietjens put his head together with any soul before: he was the lonely buffalo...  Now  Anyone: any fatuous staff-officer, whom at home he would never so much as have spoken to: any trustworthy beer-sodden sergeant, any street urchin dressed up as orderly... They had only to appear and all his mind went into a close-headed conference over some ignoble point in the child's game: the laundry, the chiropody, the religions, the bastards...of millions of the indistinguishable... Or their deaths as well! But, in heaven's name what hypocrisy, or what inconceivable chicken-heartedness was this? They promoted this beanfeast of carnage for their own ends: they caused the deaths of men in inconceivable holocausts of pain and terror. Then they had crises of agony over the death of one single man. For it was plain to her that Tietjens was in the middle of a full nervous breakdown. Over one man's death! She had never seen him so suffer; she had never seen him so appeal for sympathy: him, a cold fiend of reticence! Yet he was now in an agony! Now!... And she began to have a sense of the infinitely spreading welter of pain, going away to an eternal horizon of night... 'Ell for the Other Ranks! Apparently it was hell for the officers as well.

The real compassion in the voice of that snuffling, half-drunken old man had given her a sense of that enormous wickedness... These horrors, these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of promiscuity... That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag... An immense warlock's carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties... And once set in motion there was no stopping it... This state of things would never cease... Because once they had tasted of the joy—the blood—of this game, who would let it end?...These men talked of these things that occupied them there with the lust of men telling dirty stories in smoking-rooms... That was the only parallel!

Source: No More Parades  (Part 2 of the Parade's End  tetralogy) by Ford Maddox Ford; BBC