Strange Love Story: Parade's End

I'm still trying to figure out the characters in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End; obviously it focuses on two guys, fellow employees in the British civil service, Macmaster, from a poor family in Scotland and thus much more of a striver, concerned with the proprieties and the conventions and with advancing his professional prospects, and his friend and currently flat-mat Chris Tietjens (such an unusal name - wondering if FMF id's with him, as his birth name was the German Heufner, which he abandoned for the anglo Ford) - T. is froma wealthy family and behaves like one of the privileged, scorning convention and drinking way too heavily. The two are on some kind of public assignment or inspection, it's not clear to me what they're doing exactly, but work in the civil service does not appear to be particularly demanding. Like FMF's more famous The Good Soldier, Parade's End appears to be a love story manque, as what's really driving these guys is T's difficult relationship with his estranged wife. In a long chapter that reads almost more like a play than a piece of fiction, heavily driven by arch dialogue, the wife tells her family friend, an Irish priest, why she's written to T. and told him she wants to revive the marriage - actually, she doesn't explain her motives at all - she tells the priest that she hates her husband and that she hates their child (not clear if T. is actually the father) - we haven't seen the child even for a second yet. Well this is certainly a very strange and sick woman - so why does she want to get back with T., and, more to the point, why would he accept her back? She will be nothing but trouble, and he knows it - he's a savant, can figure out all sorts of things and has a great store or arcane knowledge, but he obviously can't manage to run his own life - and she will be no help. So though about the first 50 pp or so of the novel, we are in a holding pattern: she's in Germany, having made the offer to reconcile, and he's in England waiting to hear more details from her - he sends her a long half-coherent telegram and she responds with a few cryptic words. They're like magnetic poles pushing each other away. The first "book" of the collection is call "Some Do Not..." - perhaps a reference to breaking the marriage vows? The setting is the 1910s, and war would seem to be on the horizon, but the characters are oblivious - they're lives are consumed with triviality and meanness, and all of this is likely to get blown to hell.