vivien noakes
not imply that thisshouldbeso’, Jones wrote many years later, ‘but I do assert that
itwasso.’^50 In the darkness, these novices stumble down the dark, muddy trenches:
The repeated passing back of aidful messages assumes a cadency.
Mind the hole
mind the hole
mind the hole to the left
hole right
step over
keep left, left.
One grovelling, precipitated, with his gear tangled, struggles to feet again:
Left be buggered.^51As the rhythmic mellifluousness is shattered by the commonplace of the soldier’s
expletive, Jones brings us back to the reality of the soldiers’ experience. Yet this
too is part of the poetry. Through generations, soldiers’ discourse has been built
around ‘impious and impolite words’. He is hampered in giving full expression to
these by the sensibilities of the convention within which he is published, something
he regrets, for he sees that in the circumstances of war they can acquire a dignity
and, in their repetition, an almost liturgical quality: ‘the ‘‘Bugger! Bugger!’’ of a
man detailed, had often about it the ‘‘Fiat! Fiat!’’ of the Saints’.^52
Once in the line, the men inhabit a border state as they ‘sit in the wilderness, pent
like lousy rodents all the day long; appointed scape-beasts come to the waste-lands,
to grope; to stumble at the margin of familiar things—at the place of separation’,^53
scarcely knowing why they are there but resigned to their unknowingness, for they
have no other choice. Now Jones is concerned above all with the quiet heroism
of the ordinary soldiers as they struggle to make the best of this chaotic, unlovely
order. There are cowards, and there are those who swing the lead, but there is
also stoicism and humour in the shared life of protracted awfulness: epic heroism
exists in the grace of daily living. There are times when the men sink deep into
their private thoughts, and times when they sing, sometimes quietly, almost to
themselves—‘David of the White Stone’,^54 Welsh Calvinist Methodist hymns, ‘O,
O, O, it’s a lovely war’, even rugby songs.
As night comes on, John Ball experiences ‘the deepened stillness as a calm, cast
over us—a potent influence over us and him—dead-calm Sargasso dank, and for
the creeping things.|You can hear the silence of it.’ This eerie, death-laden silence
is broken only by another eerie sound, the ‘scrut, scrut, sscrut’ of rats in no man’s
land as they enjoy their ‘night-feast on the broken of us’.^55 The description of dawn
that follows is perhaps the most desolate of any in First World War literature. At
(^50) Jones, quoted in Miles,Backgrounds to David Jones, 81. (^51) Jones,In Parenthesis, 36.
(^52) Jones, ‘Preface’, p. xii. (^53) Jones,In Parenthesis, 70.
(^54) Ibid. 42. Translating from the Welsh, Jones doesnot give the more usual title, ‘David of the
White Rock’. 55
Ibid. 53–4.