His name was David Jones.
From a piece in the Guardian...
According to Sebastian Faulks, there are no major British novels of the first world war. He says as much in the first episode of his four-part series, Faulks on Fiction, which begins tomorrow night. In his introduction to a 2004 edition of Birdsong, his own contribution to first world war literature, Faulks notes that most novels about the war "were disappointing". What should be strange about this, but is in fact depressingly predictable, is that nowhere does he mention David Jones's In Parenthesis, probably the best book about the war in English.
Composed of free verse and prose, In Parenthesis is at once a poem, a novel, and a singular combination of both. It is a classic, both of war literature and of modernism. You wouldn't think the British Isles had produced enough significant modernist works to ignore one of the best, yet Jones's work remains woefully neglected. Not that it has lacked advocacy. TS Eliot thought it "a work of genius", and that its dense layers of meaning would be pored over in the same way as Pound's Cantos or Joyce's later work, "when [it] is widely enough known". Given that Eliot made this assertion in 1961, nearly 25 years after In Parenthesis was first published, its remaining a minority interest was already likely.
In Parenthesis covers the period December 1915 to July 1916, during which time the half-English, half-Welsh Jones, having enlisted in 1914, was on his first spell of active service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. We follow a Private John Ball from his passage across the Channel, through the ritual, routine and discomfort of trench life, to his wounding during a poorly organised attack on Mametz Wood (near which Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantryman begins) at the Battle of the Somme.
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