Where has the war gone? - in Dance to the Music of Time

Let's go - volume 9 - The Military Philosophers (!) - of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, and now we're well into WWII and the fighting - at least elsewhere - is pretty serious, but our narrator Nick Jenkins has himself safely ensconced in war headquarters in London - along with just about everyone he's known since boarding school, or at least over the first 8 volumes - Widmerpool, of course, as through the entire two previous volumes he's plotted to rise up to the level of Cabinet adviser, and here his is, as officious and loathsome as ever, maybe more so - the surprise is that Jenkins rises to the same heights, without really trying to do so - he was in vol 8 recommended for a job in the London offices but rejected because his French was so poor - but there's something about that English charm and good breeding - he's picked out as a favorite of the generals and finds himself an adviser to the eccentric Finn - a guy who gave up a military career to enter the business of cosmetics - as much an oxymoron as military philosophers. This volume opens with a conclave of top brass and their representatives meeting in emergency session about some obscure issue of Polish troops' crossing through Russian space - the issue itself doesn't matter, just the jabbing and feinting in the discussions, w/ Widmerpool particularly adept (and loathesome), at the end essentially chasing Nick out of the conference room, mostly to show his own superiority and his (self)importance - he's a balloon waiting to be burst, I think. Nick then goes of with old friend (of course) Peter Templar, who surprisingly turned up at the meeting, and is not particularly interested in talking to Nick - we now remember him as a brutish, wealthy guy whose wife was on teh verge of a nervous breakdown during a country weekend. Nick inquires, and learns that his wife is now seriously mentally ill and hospitalized. So the point of all this - the war goes on, off in the distance, on the margins, while these characters play out their own domestic, political, class battles far from the front - either their oblivious as a form of self-protection and inoculation, or they really are idiots, self-absorbed and petty - which I don't think is the case.