Have tried reading this many times, but there is a big Ford Maddox Ford drama 'Parades End' on the TV which has encouraged me to give it yet another go (this + trying to alternate paper with kindle books).
It is a very strange book, published in 1913, and about love and adultery early in the 20th century.
The Narrator is a slightly Jamesian expat living in Europe, whose wife is having an affair with the eponymous soldier. Who is in fact a bumbling upper-class chap, who falls for a succession of women.
Although it is difficult to see what they see in him, except perhaps that he is a soldier. The soldier's wife, whom the narrator may love, is tormented by her husband's adultery but has strange Catholic guilt and class related scruples about doing anything other than tormenting him.
Ford was apparently a serial womaniser, and it may be in part a defence of this and possibly early advocacy of 'free love'.
Not an easy read, both narrative and narrator are pretty opaque.
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