The Greatest Poem of World War One: David Jones's In Parenthesis

In July 1916, the British Army's Welsh Division

went into battle on the Western front.

At Mametz Wood over 1,000 men lost their lives.

For Wales the battle soon came to stand

for the bloodshed of the entire war.

And it was significant in another way.

Fighting here was a young private

who would go on to write a literary masterpiece

based upon his experiences of this battle,

a book thought by many to be the greatest piece of writing

to emerge from the First World War.

In Parenthesis is one of the greatest poems of the 20th century,

poetry operating at its upper limits.

David Jones just breaks me up.

He just makes me want to copy out the whole poem

because all of it is so good.

In Parenthesis is probably the greatest book on war in English.

Why wouldn't you want to read it?

This film is an exploration of one of the greatest books

ever written about war

and the story of the man who wrote it.

It's a long way from the mud and horror of the Somme

to an English seaside resort,

but it was here in Brighton in the summer of 1928

that a 32-year-old man sat down

to write about his wartime experiences.

So far, so conventional, perhaps.

The Great War had already spawned a wealth of writing and authors

such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves

were among the most famous of their day,

but the book that began here was entirely different

from anything that had gone before.

Slowly, over the course of three years,

it grew into what WH Auden would call

the greatest book about the First World War.

In Parenthesis by David Jones was hailed as a masterpiece by TS Eliot

and even today many poets still count it

as one of their favourite works.

I think what In Parenthesis does

is it puts us through it.

Because it's long, because it's deep,

because it's wide,

it really does reflect something of that experience

of the slowness of war,

the inevitability of war

and the incredible impact of war.

So what is it about In Parenthesis that is so thrilling?

And, if it is so brilliant,

then why have so few people ever read it or even heard of it?

Well, for a start, on first opening the book,

it isn't entirely clear what you are reading.

Is this an epic 200-page poem, a lyrical novel

or a work of stream-of-consciousness reportage?

The answer, I'd say, is all of the above and more,

which is why I'm sure so many first readers are put

so far out of their comfort zone.

It's an entirely unique piece of writing,

densely layered and deeply elusive.

At its heart, though, the seven parts of In Parenthesis

tell a surprisingly simple, often funny and haunting story

of one young man's journey into war in 1915 and 1916.

It's that story I'll be following in this film,

the same story, in many ways, as that of David Jones himself.

All stories have to begin somewhere,

and for the author of In Parenthesis

that somewhere was Brockley in south-east London.

Walter David Jones was born in 1895

into a lower middle class family of five.

His mother, Alice, was the daughter of a Rotherhithe mask maker.

His father, John, was from North Wales,

a printer by trade and a lay preacher.

It began with listening to his father singing in Welsh.

David Jones wasn't really a Welshman but he loved Wales.

His favourite childhood heroes were Owain Glyndwr

and Admiral Nelson,

so it's split Welsh-English 50-50.

His earliest experience of war was when he was five years old.

He was taking a nap in the cot beside his mother's bed

and he heard the sound of bugles and the clatter of hooves

and he lifted up the Venetian blind and saw cavalrymen riding.

His mother tucked him back into his cot and he said, "Who are they?"

And she said,

"Never mind, you'll know soon enough."

Welshness and soldiering are two of the cornerstones of In Parenthesis,

but it was another interest that determined

the course of David Jones's early life.

At the age of 14, he enrolled at Camberwell Art School.

David Jones began drawing at a very early age,

six or seven.

Some amazing drawings of animals.

A bear performing in the streets.

A lion which he saw at London Zoo.

A wolf in the snow,

which has a very strong atmosphere.

It has a sort of symbolic force

which is amazing in a drawing of a seven or eight year old.

David Jones would never leave art behind.

In fact, he went on to become as accomplished a painter

as he was an author,

one of the most celebrated young British artists

of the 1920s and '30s.

For one person to embody such a vibrant dialogue

between visual art and literature hadn't been seen

in British culture since the likes of William Blake.

The ideas that Jones developed as an artist

would go on to become a vital influence on his writing

of In Parenthesis.

Back in 1914, however, David Jones's direction in life

was much less clear.

He was coming to the end of his time at art school

and had no idea of how he would earn a living.

So, the outbreak of war with Germany presented a golden opportunity.

David Jones's route to battle began almost comically.

He tried to join the cavalry, but had to admit

that he'd never ridden a horse.

Eventually, in January 1915, he made it into the newly formed

15th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers -

the London Welsh.

Training lasted most of the year until finally,

in the winter of 1915, it was time to depart for France.

As David Jones and his comrades assembled on a parade ground,

they could have no idea of the horror they would face

just a few months later.

One of the bloodiest battles of the entire Somme offensive.

It's this moment of departure that David Jones chooses

to open In Parenthesis.

It's a book that, at every turn, echoes its

author's own experiences of war.

In Parenthesis begins at an unnamed British Army camp.

Here, we're introduced to a host of characters of all ranks.

Many of them based on David Jones's fellow soldiers.

There's Major Lillywhite, described here very simply as "that shit".

Mr Jenkins, the lieutenant, and the Welsh lance corporal Aneirin Lewis.

Most importantly, we make the acquaintance of David Jones's

own alter ego - a hapless, private soldier named John Ball.

When we first meet him, he's rushing to parade.

But his lateness has already attracted the

commanding officer's wrath.

01, Ball.

01, Ball?

Ball of number one?

Where's Ball?

25201, Ball!

You, Corporal, Ball of your section!

Heavily jolting and sideway jostling, the noise

of liquid shaken in a small vessel by a regular jogging movement.

All clear and distinct in that silence,

peculiar to parade grounds and refectories.

The silence of a high order, full of peril in the breaking of it,

like the coming on parade of John Ball.

He settles between numbers four and five of the rear rank.

It is as ineffectual as the ostrich in her sand.

That arrival late on the parade ground, in a shambles,

in a fluster, immediately David Jones makes you care about

this private, this hapless soldier, this clumsy man.

And, of course, that sympathy is made greater by

the knowledge of what came after.

Clearly, they knew they were going into

something terrible but we, as the readers, know that

it was even more terrible than they could ever have imagined.

The soldiers of In Parenthesis leave their camp

and embark on a long, wet march to an unnamed port.

Here, John Ball and his comrades board a ship

bound for France, war and the unknown.

At the end of Part One, as Ball's company arrive in the

French countryside, something very interesting happens

with the point of view of In Parenthesis.

So far, their journey has been described in the third person,

a building accumulation of 'he' and 'they.'

But now, as the soldiers "stretched and shivered at a siding,"

a switch is made to the inclusive immediacy of the second person.

Like a light suddenly swivelling onto both the author and the reader,

YOU feel exposed and apprehensive in THIS new world.

In December 1915 Private David Jones, the writer himself,

arrived on a continent already convulsed by war.

As it turned out

David Jones and his fellow soldiers weren't to see immediate action.

Instead, they were billeted in farm buildings

several miles from the front line.

When the 38th division arrived in France,

they were still undertrained.

There's no doubt about that.

Very few of them had handled a rifle that actually worked.

Very few of them had fired more than eight rounds of live ammunition.

Very few had thrown a Mills bomb hand grenade

in any sort of meaningful way.

So the need for extra training once they arrived in France

was very, very important.

It would have been learning on the job to a certain extent.

This is where In Parenthesis picks up the story.

"In a place of scattered farms and the tranquillity of fields.

"In a rest area many miles this side of the trench system,

"a place unmolested and untouched so far,

"by the actual shock of men fighting."

In the second part of In Parenthesis,

the tone and form of the writing are initially relaxed.

The soldiers are given lectures in barns,

shown the very latest military equipment.

The war is still an adventure here,

and there's a pleasure in being part of a company of men.

For all the camaraderie,

there's a growing unease at this point in the story.

A sense of innocence about to be betrayed.

A distant buzz in the clear blue skies, in fact artillery.

The sickly smell of pineapple, chlorine gas.

These intimations of violence culminate in a shocking

and extraordinary passage that closes Part Two.

It's based on something that actually happened

to David Jones here a century ago.

The writing, though, in which the language flexes to its limit

with the effort of total description

makes it feel terrifyingly immediate.

There's half a page, isn't it, of description.

It's like close reading.

I mean, it requires close reading.

But it's also like an act of close reading.

You are that close to the shell,

just as Jones was that close to the shell.

Yes, it's an individual moment.

It's a specific moment, and it's focus on that.

But, also, it sort of stands for the unimaginable business

of being under a barrage.

Jon Ball, the private,

is standing alone in a farmyard at dusk, smoking,

when he senses, as David Jones writes,

not by any single faculty, some approaching violence.

He stood alone on the stones,

his mess-tin spilled at his feet.

Out of the vortex, rifling the air, it came -

bright, brass-shod,

Pandoran;

with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt.

The universal world,

breath held,

one half second, a bludgeoned stillness.

Then the pent violence released a consummation of all-burstings out...

..all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through -

all taking-out of vents -

all barrier-breaking - all unmaking.

Pernitric begetting -

the dissolving and splitting of solid things.

John Ball picked up his mess-tin and hurried within;

ashen, huddled,

waited in the dismal straw.

Shock at the force of man-made violence had a profound effect

on David Jones.

It would be years before he could begin to transform

the trauma of his wartime experience into writing.

What he did during those years gave him the skills and ideas

that he needed to write In Parenthesis.

And this post-war process began with David Jones discovering himself -

as a maker.

When he left the Army in 1919, David Jones returned to art school.

But it was in 1921 that his life would take a decisive turn.

On a cold January day he travelled to Ditchling,

a small village in the South Downs of Sussex, where he met a man

who was to become a crucial artistic and spiritual mentor.

Eric Gill was a charismatic and idiosyncratic sculptor and thinker.

In the still remote village

he was gathering around himself a group of like-minded craftsmen.

The community of people who would make things with their hands.

When David Jones came to Ditchling,

Eric Gill felt he really had to knock out of him

what he thought of as art nonsense.

The stuff that he'd learned from the art school.

So he apprenticed David Jones to the woodworking shop

and he began really as a carpenter.

And wood engraving was something that became more and more important.

He would literally go deeper, and deeper, and deeper,

and suddenly it would be a bear, or...become a Madonna.

And he'd keep these things in his pockets and whittle away in the pub.

He was gradually exploring his own way into things.

This is the cottage that David Jones lived in,

along with other former soldiers, turned artists.

All of them building new lives

in the wake of their wartime experiences.

At the time, it was no more than a freezing outhouse and this,

along with the somewhat helpless nature of its tenants,

earned it the nickname The Sorrowful Mysteries.

David Jones brought a touch of beauty to the spartan living

conditions with a mural.

Painted in the simple, direct Ditchling style.

It's a remarkable survival

and testimony to the three years David Jones spent here.

Maybe the most important thing that did remain with David Jones

from his time at Ditchling was a feel and a respect

for the lovingly crafted object.

The best kind of meeting between the man-made and natural worlds.

He'd always loved the Welsh bairds describing

themselves as carpenters of song.

So perhaps it's little surprise that he would later talk about

the writing of In Parenthesis as an attempt to make a shape in words.

On 19 December 1915,

the 15th battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers

left their farm village in northern France.

Ahead of the 20-year-old David Jones lay a long march

into a world of increasing strangeness and violence.

They were walking towards the front line

and into the very earth itself.

Into the beginnings of the labyrinthine trench system.

At this point in the book, too, the familiar world begins to unravel.

Trees are split and shattered.

Iron and steel takes the place of wood.

The ground is no longer solid.

Mr Jenkins watched them file through,

himself following like western-hill shepherd.

And they themselves playing the actor to their jackets

on sheep walks, natural restricting between the locked colonade.

Shuts down again the close dark;

the stumbling dark of the blind,

that Breughel knew about -

ditch circumscribed;

this all depriving darkness split now by crazy flashing;

marking hugely clear spilled bowels of trees,

splinter-spike,

leper-ashen,

sprawling the receding, unknowable, wall of night...

..the slithery causeway -

his little flock,

his armed bishopric

going with weary limbs.

This is what poets do.

They make...

language...new, in order to convey something that

otherwise would be lost.

In Part Three they enter the trenches.

They're going to an unfamiliar place where all experience is new.

The other thing is it's dark.

There's nothing visual.

You have to make the experience happen for the reader,

and that's what he does in language and it's magical.

But it's demanding for the reader, too.

Certainly by the end of Part Three,

we're in a place in literature where we've never been before.

The bewildered soldiers finally reach the front line trench,

where John Ball, ever the unfortunate,

is put on night sentry duty.

As his comrades collapse into sleep,

they are transformed in the writing into Arthurian knights,

sleeping under the ground.

Soldiers of legend and deep history.

It's a recurring motif of In Parenthesis.

David Jones wants to stress the continuity between past and present.

That's what Jones' allusions throughout In Parenthesis do,

from Shakespeare, to Malory, to Homer,

to Welsh history and legend.

You've got this crazy, extreme,

brutal set of circumstances.

But they are given shape and they are made sense of by the knowledge

that other men have been here before

and experienced similar things.

It's archetypal.

People have done it before and no doubt will do it again.

As the third part of In Parenthesis closes,

the exhausted troops hunker down for their first freezing night

on the front line.

The terrible reckoning that awaits them,

and that awaited David Jones,

is drawing ever closer.

Six years after the end of the war, David Jones was ready to take

the next step on the personal

and artistic journey towards the writing of In Parenthesis.

To do this, he would leave England behind

to live and work in an isolated and ancient Welsh landscape.

Capel-y-ffin is a tiny hamlet nestled in a valley

on the Welsh borders near Abergavenny.

It was here that Eric Gill had set-up his latest commune

in a former monastery.

A place of beauty, hardship and dedication.

It's a timeless setting that would go on to haunt

the work of David Jones for the rest of his life.

So you've got this sort of deracinated Welshman, growing up

in south-east London, who kind of knows that Wales is important,

that it's the matter of his being,

but has never really been there, doesn't really know,

but when you go to Capel-y-ffin, when you go up into those mountains,

he has to encounter a different sense of time.

This is old Wales. This is the Wales of Arthur.

Immediately, you see him

trying to make sense of himself as a Welshman, himself as a nascent

poet, and himself as someone in a very, very old landscape.

All at the same time.

It's extraordinary territory to begin to inhabit.

When the time came to write In Parenthesis,

David Jones drew on the ancient history and stories of Wales

to give his book shape and meaning.

Each part of In Parenthesis was introduced with a little

quotation from the earliest Welsh poem called Y Gododdin.

This is a tale of a terrible military defeat and the

concept of the poem is that only the poet survived to tell the tale.

The relevance is heartbreaking because here he is - a survivor

of the First World War, who's come home and is writing a poem about it.

He's showing right at the very beginning that he's not going

to shut his mind to history and the brutality of it.

And, in fact, that's where his muse is coming from,

is the memory of total defeat.

ARTILLERY FIRE, BOMBS RUMBLE

As Christmas 1915 dawned, David Jones and his comrades found

themselves in the freezing front-line trenches of northern France.

This was a so-called quiet sector.

In six months here, the Royal Welch Fusiliers lost only 32 men.

The tense stalemate gave David Jones time to get his sketchbook out.

Throughout the war,

his rapid drawings captured the day-to-day reality of soldiering.

In In Parenthesis, this artist's eye for detail inspires an unparalleled

literary evocation of the mundane hardships of front-line life.

Even in a meticulously recreated trench system,

it's very hard to get a real sense of what life in the front-line

trenches would have been like.

But David Jones gets closer than anyone to making you feel like

you've really lived it.

The cold, the boredom, the sporadic terror, the terrible food,

the humour, the uncertainty and sheer strangeness of it all.

What I love most, I think, about In Parenthesis,

is the level of detail which you simply never see in Owen

and Sassoon and Graves and those officer-class poets.

So, for example, there's the passage where the Lance Corporal

turns up, dishing out the rations

and the description of the cheese in there as being hairy.

And it's the most unappetising piece of cheese you can ever

imagine, but it just gives you that sense of what it was like to

be a soldier in the First World War in terms of what they ate,

what they spoke about in the trenches.

That daily life in the trenches is what In Parenthesis gives you,

I think, better than any other First World War text I've read.

If In Parenthesis has a keystone passage,

it comes here in Part Four, right in the middle of the book.

A tour de force set piece known as Dai's Boast.

A group of old soldiers are sitting around in the trench,

bragging about the battles they have seen.

Then another soldier, a Welsh Private

known as Dai Greatcoat, speaks up.

This Dai adjusts his slipping shoulder straps, wraps close his

misfit outsize greatcoat -

he articulates his English with an alien care.

My Fathers were with the Black Prinse of Wales

at the passion of the blind Bohemian king.

They served in these fields.

I was with Abel when his brother found him,

under the green tree.

I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes.

I was the spear in Balin's hand

that made waste King Pellam's land.

I was in Michael's trench

when Lucifer bulged his primal salient out.

That caused it,

that upset the joy-cart

and three parts waste.

You ought to ask:

why,

what is this,

what's the meaning of this.

Dai's Boast is the centre of the poem.

And its centricity implies it's very important.

It is the entire poem in microcosm, if you can say that.

It's not a warrior boast like a boast before battle,

"I can kill more people than you can."

It's a bardic boast and in it, Dai telescopes back through history

and makes all these past moments present and broadens

his identity from that of a named Welsh Private to the universal

soldier, the archetypal soldier, kind of everyman as a soldier.

But he also poses an explicit question.

'You ought to ask: Why, what is this,

'what's the meaning of this.'

And he's talking about war.

Or is he?

This is a book about life.

If war has no meaning, neither does life

because war is a part of life.

So, he asks the question, what's the meaning?

Is there any meaning to this? Is it all absurd? Is it chaos?

And he stops there.

The answer to that question, or an answer to that question, is

provided by the Queen of the Woods later at the end of the poem.

David Jones's personal quest to find meaning in war continued

throughout the 1920s.

Slowly, he was ordering his thoughts and shaping his ideas.

One thing was constant through these years in his life and art.

It brought him to the monastic island of Caldey in West Wales.

And when the time came to write In Parenthesis,

it would be a key element.

Christianity had always been a major part of David Jones's life.

But in the early 1920s he converted to Catholicism.

That conversion was inspired, in part, by a wartime event.

One freezing day in northern France, David Jones found himself

scavenging for firewood among some shattered farm buildings.

Peering through a crack in a seemingly empty barn,

he saw something that he would never forget.

In front of him, lit by candles,

a Catholic priest was conducting mass for a handful of soldiers

with draped ammunition cases for an alter.

This vision of peace just a stone's throw from the front line

was, David Jones said, a great marvel.

Like something from a Celtic tale.

It became one of the most numinous experiences of his entire life.

David Jones recorded the scene he saw that day in a sketch,

and it went on to find a different expression in In Parenthesis.

You have to understand that David Jones

is writing as a Christian and a devout Catholic.

I think he sees soldiering as a kind of mass, in a sense, that the

whole body of the soldiers are all together, dying together,

living together and he sees everything

in the context of the mass.

I mean, this is a very dramatic poem.

You can see that it's naturally dramatic in the same

way that the mass is.

On Caldy Island, David Jones painted some

of his most celebrated seascapes.

When the time came to write In Parenthesis, he would return

here repeatedly, finding in the peace and seclusion of the island

a safe place in which to explore his unsettling memories of war.

After six months in the trenches of northern France, David Jones

and his battalion left the front line.

They didn't know where they would be sent next or what

they would find when they got there,

only that the war was pulling them, in David Jones's phrase,

towards the magnetic South.

When we re-join In Parenthesis, time has passed.

Insects are thick in the air, the soldiers mop their brows.

David Jones doesn't name seasons any more than he names places,

but it's clear that summer has come to the Western Front.

After the intensity of life in the trenches,

the soldiers could relax a little during these weeks

and the style of In Parenthesis is also less intense here, less

fragmented, with several passages of beautiful flowing lyricism.

John Ball and his companions go swimming,

chat in the village streets, stretch out in the sun.

MEN LAUGH

The parade was for eight o'clock for the divisional baths.

They marched lightly in clean fatigue.

And there was comfort having huckaback tucked around your neck

and everybody talking a lot.

And the day was warm like going to the sea,

and away from, a little further from the line

with each unputtied step.

He gave them a long rest for lunch, sitting in the June sun

and a grassy bank with a million daisies spangled

and buttercup sheen made warm glint on piled arms.

They packed up at 4.30 to be back in time

for 'A' company's concert outside The Dry.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

CSM Trotter sang Thora for his second encore.

The long Wykehamist subaltern

looked sad for the score they put before him, but their applause

filled up the night

and the orchard where the piano was set up.

PIANO PLAYS, APPLAUSE

RUMBLING AND CRASHING

As we near the end of In Parenthesis, John Ball

and his fellow soldiers march on into what they instinctively

know will be their place of reckoning.

Death's sure meeting place, David Jones calls it,

quoting Y Gododdin.

This is the small village of Mametz -

a name now as grimly-familiar in Wales

as the disasters of Aberfan or Senghenydd.

It's a beautiful enough scene today,

but as David Jones approached it in 1916,

the village had already been razed to the ground by war.

As the soldiers of In Parenthesis also enter this area,

an unease surfaces in the writing once more.

Normality undermined by impending violence,

a dread hanging in the air.

On the eve of battle, David Jones and his battalion bivouacked just

over the hill from Mametz Wood,

in a place they nicknamed Happy Valley.

In In Parenthesis, John Ball and his friends chat here,

try to calm themselves with ordinary talk of home,

but ordinary things have lost their innocence.

Ambulances toil up hills, the setting sun gilds shrapnel bursts,

the sound of hammering betokens the making of coffins.

HAMMER BANGS

And the noise of carpenters,

as though they builded some scaffold for a hanging,

hammered hollowly.

John Ball heard the noise where he squatted to clean his rifle,

which hammering brought him disquiet

more than the foreboding gunfire which gathered intensity

with each half-hour.

HAMMERING SPEEDS UP

He wished they'd stop that hollow tap-tapping.

At 4.00am on 10th July, 1916, Private 22579 Jones was

called to his assembly position.

He was about to take part in one of the bloodiest

actions of the entire Somme Offensive.

12 years would pass before he could begin to write about what

he witnessed that day.

Many poets of the First World War wrote on the front line or

shortly after.

But it wasn't until he was 32 years old that David Jones was

ready to begin writing In Parenthesis.

That moment came while he was here on holiday

with his parents at Portslade near Brighton.

David Jones had been painting seascapes

and one in particular seemed to be a declaration.

Manawydan's Glass Door sees Jones looking across the English Channel

towards France and the past.

The Welsh legend that the painting's title refers to

is quoted by David Jones at the very start of In Parenthesis.

Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know

if that is true which is said concerning it.

So he opened the door.

The opening epigraph of In Parenthesis

is from the medieval Welsh legend cycle, the Mabinogion.

The context for the quote is that the Welsh have come from Ireland

where they've been defeated

and they're on the island of Grassholm in Pembrokeshire

and they're there for 80 years feasting.

They were warned not to open a certain door that's on the island,

but one of the company does.

As the door is opened, they remember all their griefs,

then they have to move on from the island where

they've basically been living in a fantasy land.

So, it's the setting-in of historical memory after this

kind of parallel world of fantasy and of not knowing or trying

not to remember that they have been totally defeated.

Once he had begun,

it took David Jones four years to write In Parenthesis.

After finishing it and reliving his wartime experiences,

he suffered a mental breakdown.

RAPID GUNFIRE

The memory lets escape what is over and above.

As spilled bitterness, unmeasured poured out, and again drenched down.

Demoniac-pouring...

..souls passed through torrent..

..and the whole situation is intolerable.

The final part of In Parenthesis

is perhaps the most lyrical and powerful.

If David Jones had written just this one section,

I think it would have still be considered one of the great books

about the war.

Yet, in the context of what's gone before,

it gains an extraordinary power,

as the threads and themes of the entire work are drawn together.

This is when we learn the fate of the characters

we met at the start and the fate of John Ball,

which is to say the fate of David Jones himself.

The bloody climax of In Parenthesis takes place in Mametz Wood.

The overgrown 200-acre woodland was a daunting military objective

and, to the soldiers, a menacing wall of gloom.

In the original plans for the Battle of the Somme,

it was decided not to try and take Mametz Wood.

Because it was deemed to be too difficult.

Whichever way you attack the wood,

you would have to go down the slope, into a gully

and then up a fairly steep slope.

And then go across open ground, before finally reaching the wood.

And what was actually in the wood was unknown at the time.

One could predict what might be there,

what defences have been put in place,

how many machine-gun posts there were, etc.

But nobody had any idea, because it was all hidden from view.

EXPLOSION RUMBLES

As Part Seven opens, we find John Ball and his comrades,

huddled in a ditch.

Agonisingly awaiting the signal to go over the top.

Shells from the screaming German barrage burst among them,

bringing carnage.

Machine-gun fire from the wood pits the very lip of their shelter.

WHISTLES BLOW

MANY VOICES SHOUT

Come on, lads.

John Ball makes it out of the trench and advances.

Exposed on open ground, the flat roof of the world,

more of his companions are killed by machine-gun fire.

Mr Jenkins sinks to his knees,

his upper body swaying before falling into the ground.

Other characters we have come to know

also die before even reaching the wood.

Aneirin Lewis, Fatty Weavel, Colonel Dell.

The obscene carnival of death that David Jones conjures here

is surely one of the most striking pieces of writing

of the whole war.

Sweet sister death has gone debauched today

and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence,

makes no coy veiling of her appetite

but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.

By one and one the line gaps, where her fancy will...

..however they may howl for their virginity, she holds them.

"But sweet sister death has gone debauched today

"and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence."

It's incredibly unsettling.

Suddenly, the matriarch becomes the grim reaper.

She's gone crazy.

She's pulling them out of the line to kill them.

Something's gone very, very wrong at this moment.

Biblically wrong.

It's apocalyptic.

Somehow, John Ball makes it into the woods,

where he endures the full horror of close-quarters combat.

Soldiers caught on barbed wire are slaughtered by machine guns.

The wounded are blown up on their stretchers.

The severed head of '72 Morgan grins like the Cheshire cat.

The fractured language here strains to capture the fear

and confusion of the Royal British recruits.

John Ball and his comrades advance, fall back,

lose all sense of direction.

Soon, you realise that hours have passed.

John Ball has been fighting for an entire summer's day.

In a seeming lull in the battle,

he pushes on into the core and very navel of the wood.

As though you'd come on ancient stillnesses

in his most interior place.

But then out of the silence, a gun erupts.

And violence is visited upon Private Ball himself.

GUNSHOT CRACKS

And to Private Ball it came as a rigid beam of great weight

flailed about his calves,

caught from behind by ballista-bulk let fly

or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker

below below below.

He thought it disproportionate in its violence

considering the fragility of us.

Warm fluid percolates between his toes

and his left boot fills as when you trade in a puddle.

He crawled away in the opposite direction.

For John Ball the battle is over,

as it was for David Jones.

Shot in the leg, he was stretchered off to a first-aid post.

In Parenthesis, too, is nearly at an end,

but not before one of the most haunting and beautiful passages

of war poetry written.

Once again, the real world of the battlefield

gives way to the ancient as a mythic figure,

the Queen Of The Woods, appears.

She has come to honour the fallen men.

Not with medals or titles, but with garlands of flowers.

The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering.

These knew her influential eyes.

Her rewarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize.

She speaks to them according to precedence.

She knows what's due to this elect society.

She can choose 12 gentle-men.

She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down.

Some, she gives white berries.

Some, she gives brown.

Emil has a curious crown

it's made of golden saxifrage.

Fatty wears sweet-briar,

he will reign with her for a thousand years

For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.

Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand.

That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain -

you'd hardly credit it.

She plaits torques of equal splendour

for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower.

Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm,

where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.

Sion gets St John's Wort.

That's fair enough.

Dai Great-coat she can't find him anywhere.

She calls both high and low.

She had a very special one for him.

She carries Aneirin-in-the-nullah,

a rowan sprig for the glory of Guenedota.

You didn't hear what she had to say to him

because she was careful

for the Disciplines of the Wars.

The Queen Of The Woods bestowing garlands and honours

on the ordinary men.

For me, that reflects straight back to his dedication when he writes,

"This writing is for my friends, in mind of all common and hidden men,

"And of the secret princes."

And I think that's such an important thing here.

It's the ordinary men, it's the privates,

it's those who had the hardest time of it,

and the greatest loss of life,

to whom he wants to, through this writing itself, bestow great honour,

and love and affection.

She delivers judgements on the goodness of infantrymen

through the language of flowers.

And this includes Germans.

Dai Great-coat asks the question,

"What is the meaning of war? What's the meaning of life?"

The Queen Of The Woods implicitly answers it by saying goodness.

Human goodness.

And so, with the wounded Private Ball

crawling towards stretcher bearers,

and the Queen Of The Woods bestowing her garlands,

one of the truly great books about the First World War,

or any war, comes to an end.

But what happened next for its author?

The wounded David Jones was shipped to a convalescent home in England.

But he soon returned to the front line.

In the end, it was trench fever that ended his war,

but not before he had served

for longer than any other British writer.

David Jones' reputation as a artist grew throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

He could be reluctant to sell his work, though,

and almost always he was poor.

In Parenthesis was published in 1937

and won the major literary award of its day,

but shortly after the Second World War

David Jones suffered a further mental breakdown.

He never married.

As the years passed he became more reclusive,

living in a rented room in Harrow,

his studio, writing room, bedroom and living space.

In 1952, David Jones published second long poem.

The Anathemata.

Regarded by many as another masterpiece.

Finally, word and image came together in David Jones' late work.

Beautiful painted inscriptions in English, Latin and Welsh.

David Jones died in 1974,

in Calvary Nursing Home, Harrow, aged 78.

He was buried just a few hundred yards from the house he was born in.

His memorial stone was carved by a Ditchling craftsman.

For the man who wrote the book, and the boy who went to war,

the circle of life was complete.