Like Woolf, but not as good - Ford Madox Ford

Just to give you an idea of what a crazy difficult writer Ford Madox Ford can be, take the 2nd chapter of volume two (No More Parades) of Parade's End: like all chapters in PE it is long with few breaks. Now I know, Philistine that I am, from having watched the HBO miniseries, that this episode, in which the main character Tietjens conducts a dizzying array of army business in his outpost in France, that the upshot will be that, against his wishes, his estranged wife, Sylvia, shows up at the outpost - the only woman for miles around. Nevertheless, even armed with that information, it is almost impossible to follow or make sense of every element in this chapter. I get the drift that some sort of elderly colonel shows up and escorts T. outside of his tent/office - and in doing so drops a hint that someone - a woman in fact - is nearby to see him. T. immediately goes off in a revery, thinking his visitor is his "mistress" (though they've never had sex) the much younger pacifist-activist Valentine Wannop (you have to love those names - only a guy named Ford, real name Heuffner, would come up with such non-English oddities). At teh very end of the chapter, the colonel tells T. that it's his wife who's shown up. So why can't he just plain deliver the message? Why does he wait agonizingly long for T. to intuit what he's trying to or planning to tell him? I skimmed back through the chapter and honestly could not even find the point where the colonel made his initial appearance, much less how he introduced himself to T. or explained the cause of his visit. This is great writing in a way - but also maddening - so demanding of the reader, almost willfully perverse. As noted in earlier posts, FMF is like Virginia Woolf only not as good - at least not on the interior life - yet perhaps better on the depicting the breadth of society and capturing the sense of a changing world. He embraced the frightful horrors of the war, whereas Woolf took shelter from them (the differences in their lives and genders playing a role of course).