The nightmare at the heart of the novel: Parade's End

Half-way through Ford Madox Ford's four-volume Parade's End we are just now getting our first very tentative and shielded glimpse of the horrors of WWI at the front - in a sense the heroism and survival on the battle lines is what the whole book is about - how that changed Tietjens, the central character forever, and in the broader sense how the war change the character of the nation forever as well - England no longer felt an invulnerable "sceptr'd isle," no longer retained the rigid class structure (still there, but less rigid) and the sharp demarcation between England and "the colonies," emerged with a national pride at winning the war but also severely damaged and in a way understanding for the first time the dependence on other nations - in other words, the beginning of th end of the empire. But up to this time, as the novel jumps back and forth in its chronology, we see very little or none of the actual fighting; in one section in vol. 1 Tietjens is home recovering from shell shock, but he barely remembers his experience on the front. He elects to go back to fight, but so far in vol. 2 he's consigned to an outpost where he organizes troops and when they're ready sends them off to the front - he does this work extremely well. But partway through the extremely long chapter in which wife Sylvia visits the dour Tietjens in a hotel in Rouen, where he is stationed, and elicits information from others who served with T., while T. reads a bunch of letters she's brought - including some correspondence from Mrs. Wannop, mother of his (would-be) mistress, Sylvia begins to draw out another officer about what T. saw, and what he did, at the front - we get only a glimpse of it, and it's actually very difficult to parse, but it appears that he was caught for a time between the limbs of two frozen, mud-bound German corpses, and he witnessed some horrible stuff, notably one British soldier deliberately shooting another in the arm so as to disable the guy, getting him out of service - either one could be court-martialed for that. I expect this chapter, and this volume, will go far more deeply into the battle - the nightmare that lies at the heart of this long novel and that we are very slowly, fearsomely, approaching.