The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
In the fashionable German resort town of Bad Nauchheim, two wealthy finning couples, one British and the other American, meet for their annual date. As their stories move back and forth through time between 1902 and 1914, society's earlier fragile surface property — the First World War in which these four characters lived disintegrates — reveals deception, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. The "Good Soldier" is Edward Ashburnham, an advocate of the moral code of the British upper class, who nevertheless is caught up in his passion for women younger than his wife – a stoic but erroneous figure in what his American friend John Dowell calls "the saddest story I have ever heard."
