What're we fighting for?: the war in Parade's End and Dance to the Music of Time

As noted at end of yesterday's post could probably make an interesting comparison between Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, as two multivolume novels that hinge on Britain and a World War - I and II respectively. The novels are really different in style and tone - Powell's very simple and straightforward in tone although quite complex in regarding to the many entwined relationships among a broad cast of characters, who keep popping up in the volumes in unexpected places; it's also first-person, though the narrator is quite opaque; its ancestry seems to be direct tie to Proust, though it's not nearly as layered and introspective and, frankly, beautiful. Ford's is a third-person narrative, dense and challenging, sometime poetic, a fairly small cast of characters with pretty straightforward relationship - its ancestry is probably Virginia Woolf with a dash of Conradian adventure. FMF's story brings us right into the trenches of the war, but it's not a battle novel in the way that, say, War and Peace is - we get very little picture beyond what the main character, Tietjens, processes through his consciousness - which is amazingly focused on barracks politics, his estranged wife, his distant amour Valentin Wannop, put downs of fellow officers and soldiers, and only occasionally about military matters, which is the point - he uses all the other material as a buffer to keep his sanity and his complacency in the face of mortal danger; what really struck me about Powell is that it's a wartime novel told from the viewpoint of London hq (Whitehall) - and most of the "action" concerns handling diplomatic issues, especially with allied troops exiled to London, and the enormous bureaucracy that supports the war. What it has in common with Parade's End is the amazing British ability to keep class and social distinctions alive an active through the war - for U.S. soldiers, the war was a way to break these down, to a degree anyway - and to superimpose British class structure on the military caste. To give up the class structure would to give away the whole culture - which is what they're supposedly fighting to preserve.