The strange view of war in Anthony Powell's The Soldier's Art

Finished volume 8 of Anthony Powell's 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, this volume called The Soldier's Art (amazed that I could not remember volume title throughout reading it - title are not Powell's forte - and the edition I'm reading, Univ. of Chicago, does not even have the volume titles on the cover or the page headings); in any case, this volume continues the odd focus of the previous "war novels" in this series - the war hardly seems to be going on, except for occasional air raids, often single war planes, and bulletins from afar, and a few moments in which the narrator looks back on these events from a longer perspective - rather, these are all about the politics and maneuvers involving rank and status among the officers. Unsurprisingly, the loathed Widmerpool is the expert at these maneuvers, as he wangles himself into position for being assigned to the Cabinet Offices, and you can almost hear him drool as he anticipates consulting w/ the prime minister - but of course by the end of the volume he gets his come-uppance as an equally competitive officer puts him in a bad light; as the narrator, Nick, notes - extremely manipulative people like W. sometimes fail because they cannot imagine that others are manipulating as well. By the end of the volume, the story focuses on W's disappointments and the shipping out of Stringham, Nick's old school "chum" who's now a reformed alcoholic w a very low self image, along with the "mobile laundry" unit to some location in the Far East - N. keeps trying to help Stringham get out of this dreadful reassignment, even move him up out of the laundry, but S. continues to think this is the best for him and would rather be just kicked about by fate. He reads a lot of Browning, even reads some aloud to Nick - inlcuding a passage that gives this volume its title, the soldier's art being think first then act (that sounds incorrect to me); can you imagine Browning among the "things they carried" in Tim O'Brien, for ex.? No - this is a completely different view of war; one of the officers commits suicide at the end of this volume, and that event barely registers w/ Nick and others - showing again the very strange focus of the time - all these men, the officers anyway, still thinking about class, status, rank, and not thinking at all, perhaps for their own survival and sanity, about the dangers of combat or about the world coming to pieces all around them.