Conceptual Curzon

Curzon's problematic behaviour stems from his fundamental incapacity to understand humans. He does not understand and does not care. Notions are the only thing he gets, the firmer established in tradition the better. He throws innumerable lives to death in the most matter-of-fact fashion: "You can't win a war without casualties, can you?"
The abstraction of What War Is (that is to say, something in which people die) and preserving it as such completely supersedes the physical event of a human exploding in front of him, and the perception of such an explosion as bad. He'll have no nonsense about keeping down the death toll because it is incongruous to What War Is, and thus incongruous to his whole being.
This prioritization of ideas over reality can be categorized variously throughout the text.

Example 1:
Zero regard for own family members
"He thanked God fervently that he was an orphan, that he was an only child, and that his father was an only child, and that his mother had had only one sister.
...
In a moment of shuddering self-revelation he realized that in other circumstances it might have been just possible that he should have breathed naturally in the air of Brixton" (18-19).
Curzon pursues family allegiances according to the class that is suitable for such of his career to mingle with. In him, this idea totally trounces the natural familial instinct a normal human has. His flesh and blood are an irritating buzz that is the further, the better.

Example 2:
Misplacement of Emotion
Things that get a rise out of Curzon:
"There was a feather-brained subaltern in Curzon's regiment
...
He actually had the infernal impudence to suggest to the senior major of his regiment, a man with ribbons on his breast, who had seen real fighting, and who had won the battle of Volkslaagte by a cavalry charge, that the time was at hand when aeroplane reconaissance would usurp the last useful function which could be performed by cavalry. When Major Curzon, simply boiling with fury at this treachery, fell back on the sole argument which occured to him at the moment, and accused him of assailing the honour of the regiment with all its glorious traditions..." (23-24).

Things that do not get a rise out of Curzon:
"Curzon held the flame to the cigar with steady fingers, drawing slowly until the cigar was lit as well as a good cigar deserverd to be lit. As the tobacco flared a hundred and twenty thousand Englishmen were rising up from the shelter of their trenches and exposing their bodies to the lash of the German machine-guns hastily dragged from the dug-outs; but that was no reason for an English general to show un-English emotion" (190-191).

(More to come)

Now, I know that some of you have different, perhaps less sweeping analyses of Curzon's psychology. Thus I implore everybody to reply with their own ideas.