General Lord Edward Campion
A general of division and Tietjens' father's oldest friend — fond of him, lame, and convinced the whole business could be fixed by a decent lie.
The scandal tidied away so that nobody has to act on it. He tells Tietjens to lie about the woman he was seen with, offers to tell the lie for him, and is baffled and hurt when the offer is refused.
The book
At a glance
- General of division, magistrate, and an old friend of Tietjens' father
- Ashford station, the golf club at Rye, and a foggy Sussex lane at dawn
- Brother of Lady Claudine Sandbach, whose husband is the local Member of Parliament
- Himself, badly, having been lamed in one accident and gone on having others
- Chrissie
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeneral Lord Edward Campion is tall, white-haired, red-cheeked and very lame from a motor accident he caused himself, having never accepted that he cannot drive. He knew Christopher Tietjens' father, calls him Chrissie, and is genuinely fond of him. He is also the reason half the county knows what it thinks it knows: his sister collects gossip, he passes it on, and he believes without hesitation the one thing about Tietjens that is not true.
He is not a fool and he is not a villain. He is the book's clearest picture of how a respectable world handles an embarrassment. It settles on the version everybody can live with, and then everybody lives with it.
How the book draws them
- The lecture in the dressing roomHe begins by scolding Tietjens for causing a scene on a golf course and ends by begging him, if the woman who broke up his home is Miss Wannop, to put her back. Tietjens answers with an invented name and says nothing else.
- The doctrineHe holds that the first duty of a soldier, and of any Englishman, is to be able to tell a good lie when he is accused of something. He offers to supply Tietjens with one. When Tietjens tells the truth instead, Campion decides it is too poor a lie to be believed.
- The carHe drives his own motor out of a drive into fog at five in the morning, hits the Wannops' horse, does not stop at once, and then gets out in full dress uniform with a sword, on his way to a royal escort at Dover.
- The hornMrs Wannop sues him over the horse, which survives but is fit only for pulling a lawn-mower. He swears in court that he sounded his horn; his own sister privately believes he did not. It costs him fifty pounds and a good deal more in costs.
- What he actually thinks of himYears later, at the War Office, an officer tells Tietjens that General Campion described him as the brainiest man in his command. It is reported second-hand, after Campion has gone out to the front, and Tietjens hears it in a corridor.
Campion does not appear in the last third of the novel; the damage he set going gets on without him. He is one of the two or three people who could have stopped the story about Tietjens and Valentine Wannop simply by asking, and instead he repeats it to his sister and asks Tietjens to lie about it. He returns as a major figure in the later Parade's End novels, where he becomes Tietjens' commanding officer.