Postwar destruction, and an homage to the master - in A Dance to the Music of Time

By the end of volume 9, The Military Philosophers, of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, we see the devastating effect of WWII on life in England, in this case through the deaths of so many people in the life of the narrator, Nick Jenkins - even more startling because there are so few people in his life, at least as recollected in this series of volumes - part of the joke is the way in which the same characters keep coming up again and again, Jenkins stumbling on them in the oddest places and the most unexpected circumstances (an old schoolboy friend turns out to be the waiter in his army mess hall, for example). Over the course of the war, many die or are presumed dead Stringham , Molly Jeavens, Farebrother? - I can't even count them or remember their names. It's part of the oddity of this novel, for better or worse, is that the characters are rarely distinctive personalities, even the narrator, with the single exception of the loathsome Widmerpool, who by the end of volume 9 seems to be engaged to the sexually voracious and destructive beauty Pamela Flitton (?) - a relationship probably doomed from the start but so strange and unlikely - the uptight, even prudish W. with the cruel seductress - that it may well work out well in the end. One of the highlights of this volume is a visit to the continent, as Jenkins helps escort a group of the leaders of various allied forces who'd been sheltered in London - it's a terrific account of the ruination of Normandy at the end of the war - boarded up farmhouses, hotels converted into military barracks piles of ammunition lining the roadways - and includes a meeting with a very gruff Rommel (he's not named, but I'm assuming that's the Field Marshall) as well as a night billeted in a seaside town that Jenkins realizes is Proust's "Balbec" - and he tries to picture the scenes from volume two of Search for Lost Time taking place in this wartime setting. A great superimposition of these two multi-volume novels - though Powell's can't really measure up to Proust, he is very aware of his debt to the master - Jenkins himself reads a bit of Proust and at one point cites and includes an entire passage from Germantes Way. It's amusing, and a bit sad, to see how well read and cultured the British officers were at the time: one's reading Browning (actually not an officer in that case), another reading Adam Bede, etc. - and today I wonder if any soldier has a book at all among the things he or she carries.