war poetry, or the poetry of war? ‘stand-to’, the men, stiff-boned, dead-eyed, and ashen-faced with tiredness and
Decembercold, gaze out over no man’s land with its grey bundles of the dead:
[T]hey had barely slept—and a great cold to gnaw them. Their wet-weighted gear pulled
irksomely, soaking cloth impeded all their action, adhered in saturate layers when they stood
still...Their vitality seemed not to extend to the finger-tips nor to enable any precise act; so
that to do an exact thing, competently to clean a rifle, to examine and search out intricate
parts, seemed to them an enormity and beyond endurance.^56
This, without histrionics or glory, is what it meant to be a private soldier on the
Western Front.
Much later, they move forward into the battle of Mametz Wood, in a description
that Bernard Bergonzi describes as ‘unsurpassed for energy and exactitude anywhere
in the literature of the war’.^57 As they cross no man’s land, one by one the line gaps
as they are picked off. The bodies of the fallen will become food for those scrutting
rats, or will merge into the sodden clay as the remains of earlier warriors did in
their time, as the bodies of ‘the sweet brothers Balin and Balan|embraced beneath
their single monument’.^58 This recalling of unintentional fratricide in Arthurian
legend, reminiscent of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, is echoed on the last page ofIn
Parenthesisin the shared burial place of a German and a British soldier who ‘Lie
still under the oak|next to the Jerry|and Sergeant Jerry Coke’.^59
John Ball survives, though injured. Following the Somme battles of 1916, things
changed, as the war, ‘hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on
a more sinister aspect’, wrote Jones. ‘The wholesale slaughter of the later years,
the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom
out of the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men, within
whose structure Roland could find, and, for a reasonable while, enjoy, his Oliver.’^60
Jones, too, was injured in July 1916. He returned to France in October that year,
and remained on the Western Front until February 1918. Of his early experiences
hewouldwrite:‘IthinkthedaybydayintheWasteLand,thesuddenviolences
and the long stillnesses, the sharp contours and unformed voids of that mysterious
existence, profoundly affected the imaginations of those who suffered it. It was a
place of enchantment.’^61 But on his return to France, the enchantment had gone.
The new ways of mechanized warfare did not offer themselves to mythology and
shared history: it had now become a war unlike any other.
Had he gone on to explore that later war, there is little doubt that Jones’s deep
respect for the ordinary soldier would not have wavered. It is a sentiment endorsed
by Ivor Gurney, who, writing to Marion Scott in January 1918 in words that echo
(^56) Ibid. 64–5.
(^57) Bernard Bergonzi,Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn. (London:
Macmillan, 1980), 199. 58
61 Jones,In Parenthesis, 163.^59 Ibid. 187.^60 Jones, ‘Preface’, p. ix.
Ibid. p. x.