"This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, and was part of"
with quiet modesty, David Jones begins a work that is among the most
powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First
World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the
masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk
and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an
infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic
and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death.
And yet throughout he remains alert to the flashes of humanity that
light up the wasteland of war.