Warfare and class warfare: Parade's End

As I suspected, the second section of A Man Could Look Up - , which is volume 3 of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, brings us back to Tietjen's point of view, beginning on the duckboard inside a trench, somewhere in France, about 1916 or so (anyway, well before the Armistice Day that we see in the first section), with German lines about a 1/4 mile away - close enough so that the men can look across the middie no-man's land between them, using binoculars, and actually see people, faces, and the artillery can hurl small missiles at one another for hours on end. The experience was evidently paralyzingly frightful - knowing that in a few hours, on any given day, a shell could hit you or the enemy troops could come storming at you to over-run your positions and kill you hand to hand - or you could be ordered to do the same. The conditions were miserable, cold and we and almost devoid of light. The British, additionally, were way outnumbered and feared getting driven back to the sea - over over-run entirely. FMF conveys this with amazing precision and detail - the dead soldier in the space between the lines held aloft by the concertina wire, for one of the many examples - and it's all through the POV of Tietjens - who on the one hand is a cool strategist and on the other is plain terrified, like so many of the soldiers. Some are of the soldiers literally go insane - but there's really no place to shelter them from the coming onslaught. Others in that crazy British way distract one another with endless talk about life, culture, art - many references to poetry, including an argument about who can compose the better, or faster, sonnet - obviously these kind of conversations no longer occur on the front lines anywhere. But it's very British - showing how cool they are under stress. Also very British is the incredible racism, anti-Semitism, xeonophobis, and just plain class snobbishness that's so pervasive in the culture that I can't tell in FMF just accepts this as part of the world he trying to convey or condones it or isn't even aware of it - but it's so obvious that in British society at the time, even in the army where you'd expect a little egalitarianism, a man is judged by his accent, which tells all about his class, education, and upbringing - and it's almost unimaginable that a working-class soldier would have a chance to rise up in rank, or for that matter than anyone of the "gentry" would be assigned to menial tasks. Interesting to note, in some of my other reading, how A. Powell picks up similar themes in writing about WWII a generation later (Dance to the  Music of Time).