After the First World War, Katherine Mansfield reacted strongly against literature that she felt had failed to respond to the war's profound implications for society and culture. A letter to her husband John Middleton Murry dated 16 November 1919 indicates the extent to which Mansfield felt that this collective trauma had changed their world. She writes:

This response is one that Mansfield shared with her contemporaries. Pericles Lewis identifies ‘the sense of a radical discontinuity between the pre-war and the post-war worlds’ as the ‘greatest force contributing to the development of modernism after the war’. It has often been noted that this intensification and illumination of the everyday by the cataclysm of war pervades some of Mansfield's best-known works, particularly those set in the New Zealand of her youth, such as ‘Prelude’ or ‘The Garden Party’.

This essay, however, will concentrate not on how Mansfield's post-war writings integrate this profound sense of severance with the past, but on the moment of rupture itself: her immediate literary responses to the event that caused it. I am interested in the way that Mansfield explored, questioned and represented the lived experience of wartime as both a continuation of the rhythms of everyday life and a radical departure from them in two stories that deal directly with wartime experiences: ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, written in 1915 shortly after her foray into the war zone in France to visit Francis Carco but unpublished until after her death; and ‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’, a brief, critically neglected satirical dialogue which was first published in the New Age in May 1917.6 Both these stories aim for a new kind of mimesis that represents a strange tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary in wartime; ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ limns the intermingling of the horrific and the mundane at the front, while the blithe, detached subsumption of the tragedies of war into everyday life on the British home front in ‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’ forms the locus of the story's blunt social critique.