1. One thing Powell's A Dance To the Music of Time does very well is show the shadow of the First World War cast over the subsequent decades. Particularly worth reading is volume 6, The Kindly Ones (1962).
2. Most of The Kindly Ones deals with the cusp and start of World War II in 1938/1939 but the long opening section is a flashback to 1914, right before the World War 1.
3. The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is 10 in 1914, the son of an officer, and tells a visiting general about the military families in the neighborhood. 
4. A few pages later, Jenkins does an inventory of the families his younger self had listed off. "The Fenwicks' father was killed; Mary Barber's father was killed; Richard Vaughan's father was killed; the Westmacott twins' father was killed."
5. "Was the Military Policeman who used to jog across the heather killed? Perhaps his duties kept him away from the line. Did the soldier who chopped off his trigger-finger save his own life by doing so? It's an interesting question."
