Published in the posthumous volume, Something Childish and Other Stories (1924), ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ was written in the first year of the Great War. We know that the story is based on Mansfield's liaison with the French poet Francis Carco, whom she visited in the forbidden military zone at Gray near Dijon, in February 1915. The interest of the autobiographical element here is the fact that it mingles from the start the eroticism of love with the theme of death. It is the poetic seed for a unique narrative where Mansfield is observing, according to Claire Tomalin, ‘nothing less than the 1914–1918 war in action, not in its heroics or horror even, but in the casualness, the muddle and confusion of the French army just behind the lines in 1915’. In other words, she deals with the real substance of war experience, and the plotless narrative will be her medium for this:

It is a classic which a fellow writer, K. A. Porter, also praised for its ‘curious timelessness’, and it is this quality, I will argue, that is the hallmark of Mansfield's contemporariness to her time, and to our own; she gets to the heart of the significance of modern war unshaped by epic semblances since, as her friend D. H. Lawrence also wrote, ‘the old ideals are dead as nails’. She touches on the something ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ which, according to Freud, binds together Eros with Thanatos and to which Lacan will later give the name of jouissance.

In a brief essay entitled Qu'est-ce que le contemporain?, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the contemporary poet is the one who dips her pen in the darkness of the present time, in the blind spots of individual or collective history: a feature which no doubt characterises modernist writers.