Rendez-vous with death?: Tietjens heads to the frong

As volume 2 of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End nears its conclusion (or at least as I near its conclusion) we creep ever closer to the horror of war on the front, which looms over the entire first two volumes, without ever quite getting there: the concluding long scene involves Tietjens's interview with General Campion; Campion, in the British snobby everyone's connected way, is an old family friend of T., almost his godfather, so T. has had advantage of many favors during his time in the service in the outpost in Rouen; but now he's gone a league too far - in a hotel room brawl the night before, which we finally understand because T. has to give a statement to General Campion so we get a rare passage of straightforward narration, T. apparently shoved aside (horrors!) a superior officer, General O'Hara. Campion believes he has to punish T. for this action - though the military code is an incredibly complex affair, as they touch on many nuances of when someone is and is not under arrest, but the upshot is that Campion splits the hairs: he will give T. a "promotion" and in doing so will assign him to a new division, fighting on the front. T. realizes this is a death sentence most likely, and he has a real fear of the horrors of trench warfare (he's already been on the front, though the narration has not taken us there during his first tour of duty). Surprisingly, he wriggles a little to try to get out of this assignment, but then all too quickly accepts it with fatalism and equanimity - he's had a sense all along that during his service he would most likely "catch one" (i.e., a fatal shot). So he's bound for the front - and he's a very strange personality, whose shifts in behavior from idealism to self-interest are hard to follow, but maybe quite credible during wartime service and great stress. T. also realizes that General C. has a "thing" for his estranged wife, Sylvia, and therefore may have some real self-interest in sending T. off to his probable death.