The battle outside is raging: Parade's End volume 2

It will be impossible to post about Ford Madox Ford's quartet of short novels, Parade's End, without reference to the BBC-HBO 5-part miniseries of same. Usually, I think it's anathema to see the movie/series first - the visual and visceral impact of a movie or series comes to totally dominate our image of the book, forcing us to see the work through the director's eyes and not through the novelist's, or through our own. PE is one of the exceptions - it's such a complex, difficult, yet rewarding book - so easy to get lost and confused - yet there's plenty of great material within, including a hugely powerful plot about the development of a man's sensibility and personality seen in parallel to and in some ways as an avatar of the development of the personality of a nation - England, maturing from a class-bound, quaint, stuffy, colonial island into a modern nation with a sense of pride and of the future - as the hero (Tietjens) and the country get drawn into WWI and survive. Have to say that Tom Stoppard, who wrote the teleplay for the miniseries, is an F-ing genius - it is possibly the best adaptation of a literary work, ever - not that BBC hasn't done some great ones, such as Dorrit and Bleak House, but this work is so much more challenging I'd have thought it almost impossible. But Stoppard got at the essence of the plot without diminishing or greatly reducing the significance of the work - in fact, enhancing it in some ways. Had I started volume 2, No More Parades, without seeing the series I would have been, as I so often was in vol. 1, completely lost and confused for many pps - it's Ford's peculiar style not to id character, to just place us in the midst of a scene, so we see a bunch of soldiers huddled in some kind of barracks room or tent, as bombs whistle above, and an officer in charge debating whether he should have let one of the men home on leave to work out a marital issue, another soldier jabbering oddly out of either nerves or insanity, and so on - but I did know that the officer in charge was Tietjens, the main character of the work, that the babbling officer is someone who will be important to the story line, and so forth - much easier, that is, to step into this complex scene and understand its context (another way would be to read the whole quartet twice, I guess, but first reading would be v. daunting - and it's about 1,000 pp.). After many, many scenes of domestic strife, this scene of huddled soldiers trying to be cool and to look brave when each in his own way is terrified - is a terrific introduction to the war - which is raging outside but seemingly - not till the startling end of this chapter anyway - not really touching the men.