My companions in the war were mostly Londoners with an admixture of Welshmen, so that the mind and folk-life of those two differing racial groups are an essential ingredient to my theme. Nothing could be more representative. These came from London. Those from Wales. Together they bore in their bodies the genuine tradition of the Island of Britain, from Bendigeid Vran to Jingle and Marie Lloyd. These were the children of Doll Tearsheet. Those are before Caractacus3 was. Both speak in parables, the wit of both is quick, both are natural poets; yet no two groups could well be more dissimilar. It was curious to know them harnessed together, and together caught in the toils of 'good order and military discipline'; to see them shape together to the remains of an antique regimental tradition, to see them react to the few things that united us?the same jargon, the same prejudice against 'other arms' and against the Staff, the same discomforts, the same grievances, the same maims, the same deep fears, the same pathetic jokes; to watch them, oneself part of them, respond to the war landscape; for I think the day by day in the Waste Land, the sudden violences 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. It is perhaps best described in Malory,4 book iv, chapter 15?that landscape spoke 'with a grimly voice.'
I suppose at no time did one so much live with a consciousness of the past, the very remote, and the more immediate and trivial past, both superficially and more subtly. No one, I suppose, however much not given to association, could see infantry in tin-hats, with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands, and not recall
.. . or may we cram,
Within this wooden O , . . 5
But there were deeper complexities of sight and sound to make ever present
the pibble pabble in Pompey's camp.6 Every man's speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing: now of Napier's expedition, now of the Legions at the Wall, now of 'train-band captain,' now of Jack Cade, of John Ball, of the commons in arms. Now of High
1. Roland's close friend and companion-at-arms in the medieval French epic Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland). 2. Bruce Bairnsfather (1888-1959), English cartoonist and journalist, best-known for his sketches of life in the trenches during World War I. 3. Caractacus or Caradoc, king of the Silures in the west of Britain during the reign of Roman emperor Claudius. He was taken to Rome as a prisoner in 51 C.E., but was pardoned by Claudius, who was impressed by his nobility of spirit. Bendigeid Vran, hero in Welsh heroic legend. Alfred Jingle, character in Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Marie Lloyd (real name Matilda Alice Victoria Wood), English music-hall comedienne. Doll Tearsheet, prostitute in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV.
4. Sir Thomas Malory, author of Morte Darthnr. 5. Shakespeare's Henry V, prologue, lines 12?13. The 'wooden O' is the stage of the theater. 6. Cf. Henry V 4.1.71.
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1992 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
Germany, of Dolly Gray, of Bullcalf, Wart and Poins; of Jingo largenesses, of things as small as the Kingdom of Elmet; of Wellington's raw shire recruits, of ancient border antipathies, of our contemporary, less intimate, larger unities, of John Barleycorn, of 'sweet Sally Frampton.' Now of Coel Hen?of the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump7 in this Island, like Merlin8 complaining under his big rock.9 * 4 *
* * $
This writing is called In Parenthesis because I have written it in a kind of space between?I don't know between quite what?but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for the writer, who was not only amateur, but grotesquely incompetent, a knocker- over of piles, a parade's despair) the war itself was a parenthesis?how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of '18?and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.
D.J. From Part 7: The Five Unmistakeable Marks1
Gododdin I demand thy support. It is our duty to sing: a meeting place has been found.2
* * ?
The gentle slopes are green to remind you of South English places, only far wider and flatter spread and grooved and harrowed criss-cross whitely and the disturbed subsoil heaped up albescent.3
Across upon this undulated board of verdure4 chequered bright when you look to left and right small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort moved in tenuous line and if you looked behind?the next wave came slowly, as successive surfs creep in to dissipate on flat shore; and to your front, stretched long laterally,
7. Mound or tumulus. beneath everything. 8. The powerful enchanter of the Arthurian leg-1. Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, Fit the 2nd verse ends. 15 [Jones's note]. Lewis Carroll's mock-heroic 9. The mass of references here provide a wide area nonsense poem concerns the hunting of the eluof historical and literary association, beginning sive animal Snark, which may be known by 'five with Henry V and going on to refer to Sir William unmistakable marks.' A reference to the five Napier, who fought in the Peninsular War and wounds of the crucified Christ may also be later wrote a famous history of that campaign; to intended. the Roman legions who manned the Great Wall 2. From Y Gododdin, early Welsh epical poem built by the Romans in Britain; to Jack Cade, who attributed to Aneirin (6th century); commemorates led an unsuccessful popular revolt against the mis-raid of 300 Welsh of Gododdin (the territory of the rule of Henry VI in 1450, and John Ball, a leader Otadini located near the Firth of Forth) into of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; to a number of English kingdom of Deira. Describes the ruin of English ballads and popular songs and to charac-this 300 in battle at Catraeth (perhaps Catterick ters in Henry TV; to the ancient British kingdom of in Yorkshire). Three men alone escaped death, Elmet in southwest Yorkshire, finally overthrown including the poet, who laments his friends by Anglo-Saxon invaders early in the 7th century; [Jones's note]. to Wellington's 'raw shire recruits,' who helped 3. Becoming white. win the Battle of Waterloo; and concluding with a 4. Green vegetation. reference to the old Celtic British myths that lie
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JONES: PART 7: THE FIVE UNMISTAKEABLE MARKS / 1993
and receded deeply, the dark wood.
And now the gradient runs more flatly toward the separate scarred saplings, where they make fringe for the interior thicket and you take notice.
There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch
