Trench traffic

At the conclusion of the 'Preface ' to In Parenthesis (1937), his modernist epic about an infantryman's experiences in the First World War, David Jones explains that he chose the poem's title 'because I have written it in a kind of space between -I don't know between quite what'. 1 'For us amateur soldiers', he goes on, the war itself was a parenthesishow glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of '18and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.The manifold evocations of liminal space with which Jones ends his prefatory note are an aspect of In Parenthesis towards which critics have frequently been drawn.For Tyrus Miller, Jones's 'space between' is 'a rebus of his deep perplexity about where to stand as a writer in the postwar world'; 2 for Stephen Kern, it represents how the experience of modern warfare 'clamped the soldier in the present as if bracketed from past and future'. 3But what affinities might we also find between Jones's metaphorical 'space between' and the physical sites on the Western Front where he himself served and in which In Parenthesis unfolds?As Part 1 of the poem ends, with Jones's fictional battalion arriving in northern France, the concluding image is one of uneasy adjustment, as British soldiers take in the alien environment that will be their home for years to come: Toward evening on the same day they entrained in cattle trucks; and on the third day, which was a Sunday, sunny and cold, and French women in deep black were hurrying across flat landthey descended from their grimy, littered, limb restricting, slatted vehicles, and stretched and shivered at a siding.You feel exposed and apprehensive in this new world.( 9) Disembarking from a train that has transported them through the night, two days since departing from an unnamed English port, these infantrymen struggle to make sense of the 'new world' of modern warfare as they step inside the 'brackets' described by Jones in his 'Preface'.In placing this disorienting sensory experience as the culmination of three days' travel on foot, boat, and train, In Parenthesis associates mass transit and psychological transition as fundamentally linked to the poem's exploration of the 'space between'.Recent work in modernist studies has frequently engaged with spatial dynamics as an integral structuring principle of texts, focusing on what Andrew Thacker in Moving Through Modernity (2003) terms the 'identification of place and actualisation of space [...] the twin poles around which the spatial stories of modernism operate'. 4For Thacker, the emergence of modern transportation systems is inherently bound up with the changing perception of space that he traces in twentieth-century literature.However while literary geography has focused on urban centres as the sites of modernist spatial consciousnesswith particular emphases on New York, Paris and Londonthe topography of the Western Front has remained largely ignored.In this essay I argue that the experience of the First World War as represented in Jones's In Parenthesis is characterised by both a meticulous detailing of trench geography and moreover by a keen awareness of the 'space between' that modern warfare temporarily creates.In Part 4 of the poem, the platoon is still adapting to the 'new world' they first confronted some eighty pages earlier

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• British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914-1919

  William Philpott, Ian Malcolm Brown•The Journal of Military History•1999

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• The Experience of the World War One

  Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Jay Winter et al.•Vingtième Siècle Revue d histoire•1989

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