war poets’, concerned particularly with the First World War, are a particular sub-species in this respect, for we have and recall many descriptions of past wars and significant events, in poetic form, but how many of these poetic histories come from participants in the actual event? And how truthful are they – can they be relied on as historical evidence or are they the distant onlooker’s comprehension, or a propaganda view, morale-boosting or patriotic glorification? That’s not a question for this essay, but it is worth considering how our view of history is affected by literary mediation: after all, if it were not for Tennyson, who – apart from the specialist – would now talk about the Charge of the Light Brigade? I have been struck by the similarities between translation, this exercise of making material available across the linguistic divide, and the advantage of making a direct link, in the context of the First World War and its English literature, between the lived experience of the war and the poet’s distillation of its effect on his mind and memory. Looking at the poet as witness to history offers a further layer of examination of the writer’s work, with its own merits as well as its limitations. On the one hand, a poem or other work may contain a vast amount of accurate background description, adding verisimilitude to a narrative based on personal experience – but it may be over-written, under-written, difficult to grasp in its atmospheric incident or character picture, and so we may perceive the story or theme but not be persuaded by the surrounding circumstances; on the other, we may have a wholly persuasive piece of work that engages our attention and our sympathies – but which is seriously inaccurate in terms of fact or interpretation and therefore turns easily into pro- or anti- psychological persuasion. We need, in fact, to consider what we want from the poet, from a particular item, whether we are enjoying it as a piece of pure literature or as a way to hitch a ride on the writer’s experience and imagination, to extend our own. This is the basis for a ‘consumer protection’ warning about using poetry, novels and personal memoirs of the war as evidence: the
capacity to cause immense grief, is immediately recognisable as part of a real world: this is how things happen when the individual is caught up in a crisis structure necessarily designed to operate on a huge scale in almost impossible circumstances. Graves is a particularly suitable victim for these absurd circumstances – who could have bettered his appreciation of the absurdity of this brief sequence ? One of the most interesting ‘eye-witness’ reports on being in the war comes from another member of the same regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers – David Jones, with In Parenthesis. And here we have the paradox of Jones writing in the most immediately expressive way he could achieve, to present specific incidents in a moment-by-moment actuality – writing not as a diary or record of the past, but seeking an almost visual immediacy. In later times it could almost be regarded as a televisual film story-line despite being expressed in an intricate tissue of myth, Welsh tradition, soldiers’ humour and religious imagery. Its development took a full two decades, and two nervous breakdowns, before it was ready for release to the outside world. In the end, Jones is a twenty-years-older man bearing witness to his young self in the heart of battle – and we, now nearly one hundred years after the event, with some eight decades and another world war between publication and our present-day reading, can still use this carefully worked directness to bring us closer to the past. Any battlefield visit to the Somme should take In Parenthesis and perhaps read from it in the appropriate setting – Part 7 is his description of attacking through that same tangle of Mametz Wood, the trees brought down by shelling, the monstrous impossibility of fighting effectively through the brushwood, tree roots, brambles and with all sense of order and direction lost. Jones’s mystic and religious sensibilities add a further layer of impression to Graves’s record of his personal memory of the wood. In his work on Good-bye to All That, Richard Perceval Graves remarks on his uncle’s belief,