Trenches, Cadences, and Faces

Nancy Sherman examines the lived experience of World War I British soldiers engaged in trench warfare through David Jones’s epic war poem In Parenthesis and Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. In Sherman’s telling, In Parenthesis demonstrates how the morale and social connectivity of a unit of soldiers is built through verbal and nonverbal interactions alike. Sherman demonstrates how Jones is able to convey these tendencies through the structure and meter of his poem, in concert with its lines. This is the before; Toby’s Room, the second novel in Pat Barker’s second World War I trilogy, addresses itself to the after. Tens of thousands of British soldiers suffered horrific facial wounds in World War I, often repaired or covered up in ways that made it impossible for the soldiers to display emotions or demonstrate motives. Sherman suggests that “to have a massively disfigured face is, in a sense, to lose a social self.” Hiding the face behind a mask, however palatable to the outside world, will never offer an adequate solution.