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Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym back into the attack. ‘The Disciplines of the Wars’
exemplifiesthat peculiarly intense ‘consciousness of the past’ which Jones states
in his preface that he found definitive of his experience of the Great War (IP,
p. xi). Jones gives other, less intense Shakespearean examples: he tells us how he
saw his companions as ‘the children of Doll Tearsheet’, heard in their talk ‘ ‘‘the
pibble pabble in Pompey’s camp’’ ’, and believed the kisses he and they exchanged
with their loved ones on Victoria platformsen routefor France to have been
essentially the same as Bardolph’s marching kiss for Pistol’s ‘ ‘‘quondam Quickly’’ ’
(IP, pp. x, xi, xv). WithinIn Parenthesis, allusion may generate argument, contrasts
as well as comparisons being set in motion. Aneirin Lewis may be imagined as a
Fluellen-like figure, but, unlike Fluellen, he lies dead before the final battle; that
battle will be quite unlike Agincourt, which was rendered almost magical by the
lack of English casualties. The relationships with the Shakespearean text may be
ironic and disturbing, as well as comic and conservative. To understand, or begin
to understand, what made the disciplines of the wars which Captain Cadwaladr
restored ‘excellent’ is to understand the poem’s emotional and intellectual range:
the disciplines may ennoble, degrade, and destroy the lives of those who live among
them. They establish community, allow self-expression, but serve the ends of kings
and states. They may give much, but take away everything. For David Jones, to be
reminded of Shakespeare is to explore the nature of the Great War.
Some of us ask ourselves if Mr. X adjusting his box-respirator can be equated with what
the poet envisaged, in ‘I saw young Harry with his beaver on’. (IP, p. xiv)
One of the great and lasting achievements of Paul Fussell’sThe Great War and
Modern Memory, first published in 1975, was to insist on the importance of the
interaction between literature and life.For much subsequent writing on the war,
the key question has been not what the war was, but how it was experienced; the
Great War ceased to be a historical event, and became a phenomenon, essentially
a mental landscape, within which much of the twentieth century subsequently
occurred. Shakespeare was central to Fussell’s account of that landscape; it was
the possession of Shakespeare above all that led to the British soldier’s distinctive
theatricalization of the experience of the war.^4 Correcting Bernard Bergonzi’s sense
of the absence of myth, Fussell argued that the life of the trenches demonstrated
‘Renaissance and medieval modes of thought and feeling’ more than it did those
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^5 One might assume, then, that Fussell
would be receptive to, and take support from, the importance Jones accords
Shakespeare inIn Parenthesis. Yet Fussell is remarkably hostile to the poem—an
‘honourable miscarriage’, as one of his chapter subsections terms it—and his
(^4) Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 197.
(^5) Ibid. 115.