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Undertones of War
In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
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About the author
Edmund Blunden
253 books21 followersAuthor, critic, and poet (the latter which for which he is most well known) Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London, and educated at The Queen's College at Oxford. In 1915 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment which he served with through the end of the war. He saw heavy action on the Western Front at both Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. Miraculously he was never severely injured.
Following the war he served as Professor of English at the University of Tokyo from 1924-1927. He returned to England as magazine editor, and in 1931 he became a tutor at Oxford University where his writing career flourished. Post Second World War he became Professor of English Literature in Hong Kong.
He succeeded fellow Great War poet Robert Graves as Oxford Professor of Poetry, but lecturing proved to be a strain and he resigned after two years. His remaining years were spent in Suffolk, where he died in 1974.
He remained good friends with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, and during his career edited some of the first editions of Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney's poetry contributing to their memory. He is commemorated on a plaque in Westminster Abbey along with 15 other poets of the First World War.
Following the war he served as Professor of English at the University of Tokyo from 1924-1927. He returned to England as magazine editor, and in 1931 he became a tutor at Oxford University where his writing career flourished. Post Second World War he became Professor of English Literature in Hong Kong.
He succeeded fellow Great War poet Robert Graves as Oxford Professor of Poetry, but lecturing proved to be a strain and he resigned after two years. His remaining years were spent in Suffolk, where he died in 1974.
He remained good friends with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, and during his career edited some of the first editions of Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney's poetry contributing to their memory. He is commemorated on a plaque in Westminster Abbey along with 15 other poets of the First World War.
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April 13, 2018
Another First World War read. Blunden survived the war, physically unscathed, but he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his life. One of his daughters described him as “war haunted” and he wrote about the war in verse and prose until the last; his final poem was about survivor guilt. Nightmares were regular, most nights. He went to war in 1915, a teenage boy. By his own description he left it three years later an old man. His family felt that his tremendous creativity was partially a defence mechanism.
Blunden wasn’t at the front line all the time, he was an officer of works, transport and intelligence, so the book gives quite a broad picture of the war. He was at the front line for the Somme, Passchendaele and the third battle of Ypres. He was awarded a Military Cross.
This is not the same type of book as the ones written by Sassoon or Graves. Blunden was a countryman and he describes the effects of war on the landscape with telling effect;
“Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us. Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante.”
But in the landscape were people as well;
“Climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair. Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. . . . The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point. Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.”
This is different to many of the other memoirs I have read, there is no getting to know other characters in any depth, but there are many memorable moments, including the poignant and well known last sentence;
“No conjecture that, in a few weeks, Buir-sur-Ancre would appear much the same as the cataclysmal railway cutting by Hill 60, came from that innocent greenwood. No destined anguish lifted its snaky head to poison a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat.”
Blunden was not a natural soldier and he loathed the war, yet it haunted him for the rest of his days.
I didn’t find the poetry that was in the back of my edition as powerful as Owen or Sassoon, but some of it did resonate;
“…At the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling,
laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.”
And this juxtaposition;
“We heard the maniac blast
Of barrage south by Saint Eloi,
And the red lights flaming there
Called madness: Come,
my bonny boy,
And dance to the latest air.
To this new concert, white we stood;
Cold certainty held our breath;
While men in tunnels
below Larch Wood
Were kicking men to death.”
Blunden as he grew older acknowledged that he found it increasingly difficult to contain the enormity of what happened to him. He wrote that the war had won and kept on winning.
There is great descriptive power here and I think Blunden is an unparalleled descriptor of landscape. I didn’t engage with this as easily as I did with other memoirs but parts were very powerful.
Blunden wasn’t at the front line all the time, he was an officer of works, transport and intelligence, so the book gives quite a broad picture of the war. He was at the front line for the Somme, Passchendaele and the third battle of Ypres. He was awarded a Military Cross.
This is not the same type of book as the ones written by Sassoon or Graves. Blunden was a countryman and he describes the effects of war on the landscape with telling effect;
“Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us. Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante.”
But in the landscape were people as well;
“Climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair. Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. . . . The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point. Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.”
This is different to many of the other memoirs I have read, there is no getting to know other characters in any depth, but there are many memorable moments, including the poignant and well known last sentence;
“No conjecture that, in a few weeks, Buir-sur-Ancre would appear much the same as the cataclysmal railway cutting by Hill 60, came from that innocent greenwood. No destined anguish lifted its snaky head to poison a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat.”
Blunden was not a natural soldier and he loathed the war, yet it haunted him for the rest of his days.
I didn’t find the poetry that was in the back of my edition as powerful as Owen or Sassoon, but some of it did resonate;
“…At the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling,
laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.”
And this juxtaposition;
“We heard the maniac blast
Of barrage south by Saint Eloi,
And the red lights flaming there
Called madness: Come,
my bonny boy,
And dance to the latest air.
To this new concert, white we stood;
Cold certainty held our breath;
While men in tunnels
below Larch Wood
Were kicking men to death.”
Blunden as he grew older acknowledged that he found it increasingly difficult to contain the enormity of what happened to him. He wrote that the war had won and kept on winning.
There is great descriptive power here and I think Blunden is an unparalleled descriptor of landscape. I didn’t engage with this as easily as I did with other memoirs but parts were very powerful.
December 18, 2015
A slippery, allusive memoir of the Western Front which resists easy appreciation nowadays – many of its cool ironies and oblique descriptions are, one suspects, aimed more at contemporaries who knew what he was talking about than at future generations struggling to work it out. So, although Blunden was involved in two of the most horrific and iconic encounters of the British war, the Somme and Passchendaele, the overriding impression from this book is of a pastoralist taking note of the changing seasons, the ruined details of village life, songbirds heard at stand-to, fish shoaling in the rivers, light banter between soldiers. On the evidence of this book alone, you'd be forgiven at times for thinking that Third Ypres was an altercation of angry farmers; and when, laconically describing a direct hit on his dugout, Blunden passes over the wounded to note especially the presence of three confused fieldmice at the entranceway, you feel you are getting the essence of the writer.
Already a keen poet when he signed up, Blunden adopts a prose style that is inches away from verse; too often, though, its mannered archaisms get in the way of felt authenticity, at least for a modern reader – at least for me, anyway. Recalling an old farmhouse he stayed in behind the line, for instance, Blunden is moved to this kind of thing:
Peaceful little one, standest thou yet? cool nook, earthly paradisal cupboard with leaf-green light to see poetry by, I fear much that 1918 was the ruin of thee. For my refreshment, one night's sound sleep, I'll call thee friend, ‘not inanimate’…
This ‘not inanimate’ business is a nod to John Clare's ‘The Fallen Elm’, and the whole text is shot through with similar echoes, a few identified, but most, as here, not (though at least here the inverted commas are a clue to flex your memory and/or your Google-fu). At times the references are so strong that he simply delegates to other artists, noting of the trees in No-Man's-Land that their description can be found in Dante, and saying of the trenches at Ypres only that ‘John Nash has drawn this bad dream with exactitude’.
John Nash, ‘Oppy Wood, 1917, Evening’
Blunden's effects do often come together well, and at its best this memoir conveys much of the normalcy of trench life that is skipped over by other writers; he gives fascinating little details which I've not seen elsewhere, such as that the ‘smell of the German dugouts was peculiar to them, heavy and clothy’. Still, if you want a referential, poetic reminiscence of the First World War, I'd generally prefer David Jones's even-more-crazily-allusive In Parenthesis, which come to think of it perhaps owes something to Blunden – Blunden, like Jones, sometimes connects the war with wars of legend and history, noting for example that the Old British Line at Festubert ‘shared the past with the defences of Troy’. This is very Jonesian.
And despite the floweriness of some passages, it's the simple lines that get to you. There's a moment near the end, after nearly two years of bucolic Belgian melancholy and ‘sacrificial misery’, when, with companions dropping dead during a gas attack at Zillebeke—
I suddenly remembered, here, that midnight had passed, and this was my twenty-first birthday.
November 21, 2020
"Never had we smelled high explosive so thick and foul,
and there was no distinguishing one shell burst from
another save by the black or tawny smoke that suddenly
appeared in the general miasma. We walked along the
river road, passed the sandbag dressing station that had
been built only a night or two earlier where the front line
crossed, and had already been battered in; and we could
make very little sense of ourselves or the battle."
"We reached the very sketchy front line before it was
quite dark, soon afterwards crawled over the top, and
were carefully making out way through our own wire—
not that its puny tendrils needed much care!—when
with a crash and flame on all sides at once a barrage
began. Shells struck so fast that we seemed to be one
shell hole away, and no more, from the latest, and as
we dodged and measured our length in wild disorder,
we drifted a long way into No Man's Land."
"An intense though local shelling broke upon us. It was
a mixture of gas and high explosive, and we thought our
time had come; scurrying through the tumult we saw a
dugout entrance, rushed for it, slithered into it, just as
a couple of gas shells burst in the opening. Below, miners
were at work, and in spite of words about gas they would
not put on their masks. Before we went, two or three of
these obstinate men were gassed, and fell exhausted. I
suddenly remembered, here, that this was my twenty-first
birthday. At last the noise on top ceased and with clipped
noses we hurried through the vaporous darkness"
On grotesque iron? Icy-clear
The air of a mortal day shocks sense,
My shaking men pant after me here.
The acid vapours hovering dense,
The fury whizzing in dozens down,
The clattering rafters, clods calcined,
The blood in the flints and the trackway brown—
I see I am clothed and in my right mind;
The dawn but hangs behind the goal,
What is the artist's joy to me?
Here limps poor Jock with a gash in the pool,
His red blood is the red I see,
The white of him, and that red!
These bombs in boxes, the craunch of shells,
The second-hand flitting round; ahead!
It's plain we were born for this, naught else.
October 20, 2012
'Undertones of War' is a 1928 memoir by Edmund Blunden, based on his experiences in France and Belgium from late 1915 to early 1918. It does require some knowledge of the overall shape of the war to stitch together towns and battles, and I would hesitate to recommend it to a casual reader, because probably for the “human factor”, 'Good-bye to all That' and 'All Quiet on the Western Front' are justly more famous. However, 'Undertones of War' is a lovely read, and provides more insight into the day-to-day lives and stresses of the company officers.
'Undertones of War' is poetically written, with intentional allusion to the style of pastoral elegiac popular in the 19th century. In some places tis works better than others. Some of the series of rhetorical questions, or the addressing of a town or attractive tree in the second person could probably have been skipped, but I understand the intention behind it. The language itself is beautiful, but a bit obscure. It requires attention and concentration to read - skim readers beware.
Blunden was 20 when he enlisted in 1915, and was described as one of the youngest, shyest officers in the regiment. Blunden quickly acquired the nickname Bunny (later, Rabbit) when he arrived in the trenches. He won an MC for a daring reconnaissance mission that is described in 'Undertones of War' (although with no mention of the MC), and other than being gassed once, was not seriously injured during his service, and was invalided home in early 1918 apparently largely because it was felt he had been “out” too long.
This isn’t a harrowing read in the way that some WWI memoirs were ('Testament of Youth', for example)—although his experiences were traumatic and haunted him the rest of his life, Blunden is able to recount them with light-hearted and self-reflective humour. Although Blunden deals with the horror of trench life (particularly effectively when he talks about 3rd Ypres), he also spent quite a bit of time away from the line - as transport officer, works officer, intelligence officer, and the like, so there is an interesting view of the support functions of the battalion, and less of the dynamics of platoon and company.
I think much to the charm comes from Blunden’s narrative style. I found myself smiling while reading when Blunden talked about how the mercenary behaviour of the residents of Thievres provided occasion for some puns on the town’s name, or when, upon it being decided that patrols should wear white for camouflage in the snow, they were provided with a consignment of women’s nightgowns. He comes across as a bit of an affable dork, not the typical WWI officer-type, and his narrative voice is really quite charming.
'Undertones of War' is a memoir of the purest sort: a recounting of Blunden’s experience in the war. Although as I said above other memoirs/novelisations arguably have more value because they engage with the politics and virtue of what was occurring, it is nice to read something that has no agenda except a very mild lament for the England that was lost in the upheaval of war.
'Undertones of War' is poetically written, with intentional allusion to the style of pastoral elegiac popular in the 19th century. In some places tis works better than others. Some of the series of rhetorical questions, or the addressing of a town or attractive tree in the second person could probably have been skipped, but I understand the intention behind it. The language itself is beautiful, but a bit obscure. It requires attention and concentration to read - skim readers beware.
Blunden was 20 when he enlisted in 1915, and was described as one of the youngest, shyest officers in the regiment. Blunden quickly acquired the nickname Bunny (later, Rabbit) when he arrived in the trenches. He won an MC for a daring reconnaissance mission that is described in 'Undertones of War' (although with no mention of the MC), and other than being gassed once, was not seriously injured during his service, and was invalided home in early 1918 apparently largely because it was felt he had been “out” too long.
This isn’t a harrowing read in the way that some WWI memoirs were ('Testament of Youth', for example)—although his experiences were traumatic and haunted him the rest of his life, Blunden is able to recount them with light-hearted and self-reflective humour. Although Blunden deals with the horror of trench life (particularly effectively when he talks about 3rd Ypres), he also spent quite a bit of time away from the line - as transport officer, works officer, intelligence officer, and the like, so there is an interesting view of the support functions of the battalion, and less of the dynamics of platoon and company.
I think much to the charm comes from Blunden’s narrative style. I found myself smiling while reading when Blunden talked about how the mercenary behaviour of the residents of Thievres provided occasion for some puns on the town’s name, or when, upon it being decided that patrols should wear white for camouflage in the snow, they were provided with a consignment of women’s nightgowns. He comes across as a bit of an affable dork, not the typical WWI officer-type, and his narrative voice is really quite charming.
'Undertones of War' is a memoir of the purest sort: a recounting of Blunden’s experience in the war. Although as I said above other memoirs/novelisations arguably have more value because they engage with the politics and virtue of what was occurring, it is nice to read something that has no agenda except a very mild lament for the England that was lost in the upheaval of war.
November 30, 2023
I love that my English Language and Literature degree is expanding my reading library but I will say, I am far too much of a sensitive soul to truly grasp the contents of this novel. Given the title Undertones of War, this novel requires a lot from you. A lot I do not have. Despite this, it was very good though. The poetry at the end was lovely, if lovely is the correct word here considering the topic, addition.
Things I learnt from this: I definitely would not read it again. I definitely will not be choosing this to write an assignment on. Beyond my degree and future career prospects of education, I will never pick up a book on war again unless strictly necessary.
Things I learnt from this: I definitely would not read it again. I definitely will not be choosing this to write an assignment on. Beyond my degree and future career prospects of education, I will never pick up a book on war again unless strictly necessary.
October 26, 2015
An astonishing book. There is a move to restore the prestige of British High Command and the senior military figures of the 1914-18 war. The arguments blame the re-writing of the history of the trenches by later historians like Alan Clark and the theatrical types like Joan Littlewood. If this argument has any weight then the history of the war told before the 1950s should be one of great decisions and bold leadership. I've read a number of first hand accounts of what the war was like and I cannot find anything to undermine the "lions led by donkeys" point of view. Blunden is as loyal as an officer can be; both to the men he feels responsible for and the senior officers he feels responsible to. Yet even here there is a strong sense (openly expressed at times) of despair and frustration at decisions that are doomed to failure at the inevitable cost of thousands of lives.
The book doesn't reveal itself as easily as some others. This is the prose of a writer aware of literary developments. The prose is concentrated and often doesn't bother telling the entire narrative. Like the war paintings of Paul Nash (who is credited within these pages with capturing the truth of the battlefield) the writing seeks a non-traditional revelation.
A painful book but a beautiful one. I have a sense of amazement that these people were able to come through these events and to continue to lead their lives afterwards. It is more than a man should have to experience. Towards the end of the book (after enduring nearly two years of life as a officer) Blunden realises that while he has been out on patrol under heavy shelling and gas attack, it has turned midnight and he has become twenty-one. Astonishing!
The book doesn't reveal itself as easily as some others. This is the prose of a writer aware of literary developments. The prose is concentrated and often doesn't bother telling the entire narrative. Like the war paintings of Paul Nash (who is credited within these pages with capturing the truth of the battlefield) the writing seeks a non-traditional revelation.
A painful book but a beautiful one. I have a sense of amazement that these people were able to come through these events and to continue to lead their lives afterwards. It is more than a man should have to experience. Towards the end of the book (after enduring nearly two years of life as a officer) Blunden realises that while he has been out on patrol under heavy shelling and gas attack, it has turned midnight and he has become twenty-one. Astonishing!
December 17, 2020
In J.L.Carr's 'A Month in the Country', the narrator and one of the main characters are soldiers in the First World War, and that experience leaves a permanent impact on their psyche. After I read the book, I thought I'll read a First World War memoir to understand this more and I picked up Edmund Blunden's 'Undertones of War'.
I discovered Edmund Blunden when I was in school. An excerpt from his book 'Cricket Country' was one of the lessons in our English textbook. In that section, Blunden talks about the beauty of the English cricket season and mentions the great allrounder Frank Woolley. After I read that excerpt, I wanted to read the book. But I discovered that 'Cricket Country' was long out-of-print. Years later I searched for it in Gutenberg and at other places online and it was still not possible to find. But while looking for this, I discovered that Blunden has written a First World War memoir. I was amazed! I always thought that Blunden was a cricket writer. It turned out that he was a poet who fought in the First World War. Blunden's cricket book is almost never mentioned anywhere and it seems to be just a footnote in his career. I am not giving up though – I'll still keep looking for it.
On the book itself, 'Undertones of War' is regarded as one of the great memoirs of the First World War. It has been compared to Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That'. Blunden is frequently mentioned together with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon as the three poets who fought in the First World War and survived to tell the tale.
Blunden's memoir is not long. The edition I have is 190 pages long. Blunden doesn't beat around the bush and start the book from his childhood and describe his family to us. He just gets to the point and describes how he signs up and gets called up to serve in the army. This happens on the first page. The rest of the book is about his war experiences. The book ends with Blunden coming back home, and the war not being over yet.
So what do I think about the book? Blunden is a poet, and it shows in every page. If it is possible to describe something in plain language and describe the same in poetic language, Blunden almost always chooses the second option. So there are many beautiful sentences and descriptions in the book. Sometimes it feels like we are reading a Wordsworth poem. For example, these lines –
"I heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the language of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus."
And these lines –
"The village was friendly, and near it lay the marshy land full of tall and whispering reeds, over which evening looked her last with an unusual sad beauty, well suiting one's mood."
Even when he describes the war, he describes it like this –
"On the blue and lulling mist of evening, proper to the nightingale, the sheepbell and falling waters, the strangest phenomena of fire inflicted themselves. The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds."
Blunden describes nature poetically at every opportunity he gets. This book has been described as an extended pastoral elegy in prose, and that is what it is.
There are, of course, descriptions of war, and shells exploding, and people getting killed, but those descriptions are not graphic or gruesome but brief, unlike war memoirs which might be written today.
Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence –
"The weather had turned heavy and musty, the pre-ordained weather of British operations."
And this sentence –
"No protection against anything more violent than a tennis-ball was easily discernible along that village street...Our future, in short, depended on the observance of the 'Live and Let Live' principle, one of the soundest elements in trench war."
I laughed when I read that 😁
Blunden also describes incidents in the book, which can only be called dark humour of the Kafkaesque variety (or the Coen brothers' variety). I don't want to mention them here and spoil the surprise for you. I'll just say that they are funny, but also tragic. Blunden also describes many of the people he worked with during the war and some of them are fascinating. My two favourites were Corporal Worley and Colonel Harrison. A couple of dogs also make their appearance in the story at different times, one of whom is adopted by the army and another who is adopted by Blunden.
When he ends the book, Blunden calls himself 'a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat.' It made me smile. I couldn't resist comparing Blunden with Pierre from 'War and Peace' – both nice people, both fight in a war, both have a dog, both are harmless young shepherds.
'Undertones of War' is like no other war memoir I've read. It is beautiful and poetic, it demands attention and involvement, and it bestows rich rewards if one reads it slowly while savouring and lingering on its beautiful sentences. The book also has a forty-page poetry section in the end, which has poems which cover some of the same themes and sometimes events described in the book. I didn't read that part, but have saved it for a rainy day.
I loved 'Undertones of War'. I am glad I read it finally. Now I want to read Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That' and compare it with this. And I'll continue my search for that elusive pearl, Blunden's 'Cricket Country'.
Have you read 'Undertones of War'? What do you think about it?
I discovered Edmund Blunden when I was in school. An excerpt from his book 'Cricket Country' was one of the lessons in our English textbook. In that section, Blunden talks about the beauty of the English cricket season and mentions the great allrounder Frank Woolley. After I read that excerpt, I wanted to read the book. But I discovered that 'Cricket Country' was long out-of-print. Years later I searched for it in Gutenberg and at other places online and it was still not possible to find. But while looking for this, I discovered that Blunden has written a First World War memoir. I was amazed! I always thought that Blunden was a cricket writer. It turned out that he was a poet who fought in the First World War. Blunden's cricket book is almost never mentioned anywhere and it seems to be just a footnote in his career. I am not giving up though – I'll still keep looking for it.
On the book itself, 'Undertones of War' is regarded as one of the great memoirs of the First World War. It has been compared to Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That'. Blunden is frequently mentioned together with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon as the three poets who fought in the First World War and survived to tell the tale.
Blunden's memoir is not long. The edition I have is 190 pages long. Blunden doesn't beat around the bush and start the book from his childhood and describe his family to us. He just gets to the point and describes how he signs up and gets called up to serve in the army. This happens on the first page. The rest of the book is about his war experiences. The book ends with Blunden coming back home, and the war not being over yet.
So what do I think about the book? Blunden is a poet, and it shows in every page. If it is possible to describe something in plain language and describe the same in poetic language, Blunden almost always chooses the second option. So there are many beautiful sentences and descriptions in the book. Sometimes it feels like we are reading a Wordsworth poem. For example, these lines –
"I heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the language of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus."
And these lines –
"The village was friendly, and near it lay the marshy land full of tall and whispering reeds, over which evening looked her last with an unusual sad beauty, well suiting one's mood."
Even when he describes the war, he describes it like this –
"On the blue and lulling mist of evening, proper to the nightingale, the sheepbell and falling waters, the strangest phenomena of fire inflicted themselves. The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds."
Blunden describes nature poetically at every opportunity he gets. This book has been described as an extended pastoral elegy in prose, and that is what it is.
There are, of course, descriptions of war, and shells exploding, and people getting killed, but those descriptions are not graphic or gruesome but brief, unlike war memoirs which might be written today.
Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence –
"The weather had turned heavy and musty, the pre-ordained weather of British operations."
And this sentence –
"No protection against anything more violent than a tennis-ball was easily discernible along that village street...Our future, in short, depended on the observance of the 'Live and Let Live' principle, one of the soundest elements in trench war."
I laughed when I read that 😁
Blunden also describes incidents in the book, which can only be called dark humour of the Kafkaesque variety (or the Coen brothers' variety). I don't want to mention them here and spoil the surprise for you. I'll just say that they are funny, but also tragic. Blunden also describes many of the people he worked with during the war and some of them are fascinating. My two favourites were Corporal Worley and Colonel Harrison. A couple of dogs also make their appearance in the story at different times, one of whom is adopted by the army and another who is adopted by Blunden.
When he ends the book, Blunden calls himself 'a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat.' It made me smile. I couldn't resist comparing Blunden with Pierre from 'War and Peace' – both nice people, both fight in a war, both have a dog, both are harmless young shepherds.
'Undertones of War' is like no other war memoir I've read. It is beautiful and poetic, it demands attention and involvement, and it bestows rich rewards if one reads it slowly while savouring and lingering on its beautiful sentences. The book also has a forty-page poetry section in the end, which has poems which cover some of the same themes and sometimes events described in the book. I didn't read that part, but have saved it for a rainy day.
I loved 'Undertones of War'. I am glad I read it finally. Now I want to read Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That' and compare it with this. And I'll continue my search for that elusive pearl, Blunden's 'Cricket Country'.
Have you read 'Undertones of War'? What do you think about it?
December 17, 2023
I don‘t read a lot of poetry and while this is a novel, it‘s written by a poet. So, at first I felt like I was reading a book written in a foreign language. It really demands your attention. But my god, it‘s left such an impact on me and even now, years later, I can‘t stop thinking about it. It‘s a masterpiece and so quietly devastating.
Read
November 29, 2022i did Not finish this book unless you're from uni and then I did definitely 100% finish this book
June 13, 2019
“Cambrin was beginning to terrify. Not far away from that shafthead, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three firebays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and thought all was lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place recalled me; the shall had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer? At this moment, while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.” (p.45-46)
The three most renowned English language memoirs of the Great War are Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That, and this one, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. All are well worth reading, though each adopts a different tone. Sassoon uses ironical detachment, laconically observing the absurdities of war and the madness of combat. Graves emphasizes the injustice and incompetence of the conflict. His book is the most entertaining to read, but the least accurate historically, and both Blunden and Sassoon (who was a personal friend of his) thought he had gone too far in emphasizing the lambs-to-the-slaughter aspect of the war.
Blunden’s tone is pastoral and elegiac, and he is the best of the three authors at setting a scene, whether he is describing the flowers in a village behind the lines to contrast their idyllic nature with the sounds of shelling a couple miles away, or the ghastly smells and sticky mud of a nighttime slither beyond the wire to reconnoiter an enemy position.
Although he served well, earning the respect of his comrades, Blunden was always more of a civilian and a poet, than a soldier. His nickname as a subaltern was “Rabbit,” and in his early months he got hopelessly tongue-tied in the presence of senior officers.
He was exasperated by how much time the Army spent on things that had nothing to do with winning the war, things which seemed to exist solely to demonstrate the power that comes with rank, or to justify keeping a comfortable job far to the rear. (As someone who served in the military, I can assure you that both of those types still exist in abundance.) He mentions sending soldiers to battalion headquarters for guard duty and having them twice rejected for their appearance even though everything they had on was clean and correct. The staff officer responsible was apparently just having a bad day and took it out on a convenient target. Similarly, the army loved forms and reports, and much of the officers’ time was spent endlessly filling them out. Blunden recalls that once, in the middle of an action, with artillery, machine guns, and small arms in action, wounded men being treated, and all the associated chaos of combat, someone at battalion headquarters thought it was a good time to send a runner with an order to report the number of spades and pickaxes the company held, and “please expedite.”
His poetry may have saved his life, and not just in the figurative sense of keeping his sanity. Before shipping out for France he had submitted a collection of poems for publication, which received favorable mention in the Times Literary Supplement. His battalion commander saw the review, and pulled him out of his company to serve on battalion staff first as Field Works officer, and later as a battalion, then brigade, intelligence officer. He was still exposed to considerable danger, reconnoitering in front of the wire or leading carrying parties through communications trenches under shellfire, but he did not have to personally lead the infantry assaults that repeatedly devastated his battalion. In the months prior to Third Ypres (Passchendaele) he requested, and was granted, transfer back to his battalion, where he spent the rest of his time in France as the battalion signaling officer.
At one point he mentions something I have never read about in other memoirs, and had not considered. Reconnaissance beyond the wire was a regular, and extremely dangerous, operation. Absolute silence was imperative, ambushes frequent. Shells and traversing machine gun fire crisscrossed the battlefield, flares went up every few seconds, the ground was often muddy and obstructed, and there was always a chance of stumbling upon an enemy patrol. Even after a successful operation it was dangerous returning to one’s own lines, as frightened sentries sometimes shot at anything that moved. Siegfried Sassoon was shot in the head returning from one such patrol, badly wounded and sent back to England. With all this going on, it was imperative to know where you were, so that you could make an accurate report of what you had seen, and bring your patrol back to your lines, but what Blunden mentions that I had never read before was that out in No Man’s Land there was so much metal from wire, shrapnel, and abandoned equipment, that it caused the compass needles to swing wildly, adding yet another tense and dangerous factor for the patrol leaders, who were usually subalterns and often still teenagers, to consider.
He fought on two of the war’s great killing grounds, the Somme and Passchendaele. His battalion arrived on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield in September 1916, missing the great slaughters of the summer, but in time for two bloody months in the mud-sodden vicinity of Thiepval Wood, an area of vicious fighting and heavy casualties.
In late 1916 his brigade moved north into the Ypres Salient. Blunden’s description of life in the Salient is vivid and memorable. The Germans surrounded the city of Ypres on three sides, north, south, and east. Furthermore, they held the high ground so they had direct observation into every part of the city. They had registered mortars and artillery on every point where British troops might assemble, and kept up a continuous bombardment. The British lived in cellars and dugouts with the knowledge that a hit by a heavy shell would collapse the roof and bury them. For months Blundens’ brigade would alternate weeks in the trenches, in the snow, freezing mud, and bitter cold, with a troglodyte life underground in Ypres, and occasional spells farther behind the line to train and refit.
Winter eventually turned to spring, and as summer 1917 approached everyone knew another great offensive as coming. On July 31st the battle of Passchendaele began. The British made good progress in the first days, but then the rains came, the rainiest summer in Belgium in seventy-five years. The battlefield became a sea of mud. To leave the duckboard paths between the front and rear was to risk drowning in the mud, but to stay on them meant enduring the barrage, since the Germans had registered their entire length for artillery fire. Blunden describes nightmarish fighting in flooded ditches, under intense fire, with one friend after another dying and his battalion decimated once again.
Between July and November they went back into the line again and again until the battle gradually played itself out in the seas of mud, until even Haig came to understand that continuing the assaults was just murder. Somehow, despite men dying all around him, Blunden was never wounded.
In Sassoon’s memoir, he mentions that it was generally accepted that men were used up after six months in infantry units. By that time their nerves were shot and their bodies were worn out. Blunden spent a year and half in France, and even with his staff positions had seen enough of combat to have reached his limit. He was sent back to England in February 1918 to train new troops, and he remained there until the end of the war. Once again the fates smiled on him, because a month after he left France the Germans launched their last great offensive, and his battalion was thrown in to try to stem the advance. In two days they lost 20 officers and 300 enlisted men, over half their strength. The losses were so severe that the battalion was never reconstituted, and the remaining men split into two groups.
The fates of the two groups are a perfect example of the absurdity of war. Half of them got the best possible assignment, short of actually returning to England. They were sent to train the newly arrived Americans, and had safe positions far behind the front line, with easy duty, hot food, barracks to live in, and frequent passes to town. The other half got perhaps the worst orders possible. They were shipped seven thousand miles to Vladivostok to fight the Bolsheviks, enduring Siberian winter, inadequate support, and fighting a confused war where the White Russians were as murderous as the Reds, and much more poorly led. Such are the vagaries of war.
This book deserves its reputation as one of the great war memoirs of all time. Blunden lets a scene speak for itself, understanding that sometimes fewer words mean greater impact. Following are some quotes that demonstrate his ability to describe a situation, and let the reader fill in for himself the psychological and emotional impact.
“Some of us were just in time, when next the enemy gunners whizzbanged here, to jump down from the fire-step into a dugout stairway; waiting there, I felt the air rush in hot tongues on us as shell after shell burst just at the exit.” (p. 26)
“To hear the beating of the gas tom-toms for many an acre, when the night mist lay heavily in the moonlight, traversing a silence and solitude beyond ordinary life, was fantastic enough. It was all a ghost story.” (p. 36)
“As we plodded down the dark hill, the blackness over by Thiepval Wood leapt alive with tossing flares, which made it seem a monstrous height, and with echo after echo in stammering mad pursuit the guns threshed that area; uncounted shells passed over with savage whipcracks, and travelled meteor-like with lines of flame through the brooding sultry air.” (p.68)
“The Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and earth, and life were much the same thing – and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison…. Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. Here we were to ‘hold the line,’ for an uncertain sentence of days.” (p. 98)
“we were ordered to relieve the 14th Hampshires in their position ahead, justly termed the Black Line, along the Steenbeck. The order presented no great intellectual difficulty, for our reduced battalion mere had to rise from its water-holes, plod through the mud of an already beaten track and crouch on the watch in other holes. Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us. Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante.” (p. 157)
“We were relieved in broad daylight, under every sort of observation, but nobody refused to move. The estimate of our casualties was 400, and although the real number was 280 or so, the battalion had had enough. When all my men had gone, including Sergeant Worley, who had been my fearless, tireless ‘second’ all the time, I found Sergeant Craddock, of the Orderly Room, also ready to depart. We stared over the ‘ornamental lakes,’ now a swamp with a dry crust of a surface, and tree-stubs here and there offering substantial foothold. Already there was a marked track across, and shells were thundering and smoking along it. Craddock seized his portfolios (the paper war always accompanied its rival) and I my belongings; we look silently at one another, and went. We immediately passed the bodies of two men just killed, the sweat on their faces, and with shouts of uncontrol we ran for life through the shell and the swamps. [Y]ou could almost feel the German gunners loading for you; we emerged short of breath.” (p. 170-171)
“During my leave, I remember principally observing the large decay of lively bright love of country, the crystallization of dull civilian hatred on the basis of ‘the last drop of blood’; the fact that the German air raids had persuaded my London friends that London was the sole battle front; the illusion that the British Army beyond Ypres was going from success to success; the ration system. The ration system. Perhaps the ration system weighted most upon us. This was not the ancient reward of the warrior! He had never had s sugar-card in Marlborough’s wars, or even 1916.” (p.162)
The three most renowned English language memoirs of the Great War are Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That, and this one, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. All are well worth reading, though each adopts a different tone. Sassoon uses ironical detachment, laconically observing the absurdities of war and the madness of combat. Graves emphasizes the injustice and incompetence of the conflict. His book is the most entertaining to read, but the least accurate historically, and both Blunden and Sassoon (who was a personal friend of his) thought he had gone too far in emphasizing the lambs-to-the-slaughter aspect of the war.
Blunden’s tone is pastoral and elegiac, and he is the best of the three authors at setting a scene, whether he is describing the flowers in a village behind the lines to contrast their idyllic nature with the sounds of shelling a couple miles away, or the ghastly smells and sticky mud of a nighttime slither beyond the wire to reconnoiter an enemy position.
Although he served well, earning the respect of his comrades, Blunden was always more of a civilian and a poet, than a soldier. His nickname as a subaltern was “Rabbit,” and in his early months he got hopelessly tongue-tied in the presence of senior officers.
He was exasperated by how much time the Army spent on things that had nothing to do with winning the war, things which seemed to exist solely to demonstrate the power that comes with rank, or to justify keeping a comfortable job far to the rear. (As someone who served in the military, I can assure you that both of those types still exist in abundance.) He mentions sending soldiers to battalion headquarters for guard duty and having them twice rejected for their appearance even though everything they had on was clean and correct. The staff officer responsible was apparently just having a bad day and took it out on a convenient target. Similarly, the army loved forms and reports, and much of the officers’ time was spent endlessly filling them out. Blunden recalls that once, in the middle of an action, with artillery, machine guns, and small arms in action, wounded men being treated, and all the associated chaos of combat, someone at battalion headquarters thought it was a good time to send a runner with an order to report the number of spades and pickaxes the company held, and “please expedite.”
His poetry may have saved his life, and not just in the figurative sense of keeping his sanity. Before shipping out for France he had submitted a collection of poems for publication, which received favorable mention in the Times Literary Supplement. His battalion commander saw the review, and pulled him out of his company to serve on battalion staff first as Field Works officer, and later as a battalion, then brigade, intelligence officer. He was still exposed to considerable danger, reconnoitering in front of the wire or leading carrying parties through communications trenches under shellfire, but he did not have to personally lead the infantry assaults that repeatedly devastated his battalion. In the months prior to Third Ypres (Passchendaele) he requested, and was granted, transfer back to his battalion, where he spent the rest of his time in France as the battalion signaling officer.
At one point he mentions something I have never read about in other memoirs, and had not considered. Reconnaissance beyond the wire was a regular, and extremely dangerous, operation. Absolute silence was imperative, ambushes frequent. Shells and traversing machine gun fire crisscrossed the battlefield, flares went up every few seconds, the ground was often muddy and obstructed, and there was always a chance of stumbling upon an enemy patrol. Even after a successful operation it was dangerous returning to one’s own lines, as frightened sentries sometimes shot at anything that moved. Siegfried Sassoon was shot in the head returning from one such patrol, badly wounded and sent back to England. With all this going on, it was imperative to know where you were, so that you could make an accurate report of what you had seen, and bring your patrol back to your lines, but what Blunden mentions that I had never read before was that out in No Man’s Land there was so much metal from wire, shrapnel, and abandoned equipment, that it caused the compass needles to swing wildly, adding yet another tense and dangerous factor for the patrol leaders, who were usually subalterns and often still teenagers, to consider.
He fought on two of the war’s great killing grounds, the Somme and Passchendaele. His battalion arrived on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield in September 1916, missing the great slaughters of the summer, but in time for two bloody months in the mud-sodden vicinity of Thiepval Wood, an area of vicious fighting and heavy casualties.
In late 1916 his brigade moved north into the Ypres Salient. Blunden’s description of life in the Salient is vivid and memorable. The Germans surrounded the city of Ypres on three sides, north, south, and east. Furthermore, they held the high ground so they had direct observation into every part of the city. They had registered mortars and artillery on every point where British troops might assemble, and kept up a continuous bombardment. The British lived in cellars and dugouts with the knowledge that a hit by a heavy shell would collapse the roof and bury them. For months Blundens’ brigade would alternate weeks in the trenches, in the snow, freezing mud, and bitter cold, with a troglodyte life underground in Ypres, and occasional spells farther behind the line to train and refit.
Winter eventually turned to spring, and as summer 1917 approached everyone knew another great offensive as coming. On July 31st the battle of Passchendaele began. The British made good progress in the first days, but then the rains came, the rainiest summer in Belgium in seventy-five years. The battlefield became a sea of mud. To leave the duckboard paths between the front and rear was to risk drowning in the mud, but to stay on them meant enduring the barrage, since the Germans had registered their entire length for artillery fire. Blunden describes nightmarish fighting in flooded ditches, under intense fire, with one friend after another dying and his battalion decimated once again.
Between July and November they went back into the line again and again until the battle gradually played itself out in the seas of mud, until even Haig came to understand that continuing the assaults was just murder. Somehow, despite men dying all around him, Blunden was never wounded.
In Sassoon’s memoir, he mentions that it was generally accepted that men were used up after six months in infantry units. By that time their nerves were shot and their bodies were worn out. Blunden spent a year and half in France, and even with his staff positions had seen enough of combat to have reached his limit. He was sent back to England in February 1918 to train new troops, and he remained there until the end of the war. Once again the fates smiled on him, because a month after he left France the Germans launched their last great offensive, and his battalion was thrown in to try to stem the advance. In two days they lost 20 officers and 300 enlisted men, over half their strength. The losses were so severe that the battalion was never reconstituted, and the remaining men split into two groups.
The fates of the two groups are a perfect example of the absurdity of war. Half of them got the best possible assignment, short of actually returning to England. They were sent to train the newly arrived Americans, and had safe positions far behind the front line, with easy duty, hot food, barracks to live in, and frequent passes to town. The other half got perhaps the worst orders possible. They were shipped seven thousand miles to Vladivostok to fight the Bolsheviks, enduring Siberian winter, inadequate support, and fighting a confused war where the White Russians were as murderous as the Reds, and much more poorly led. Such are the vagaries of war.
This book deserves its reputation as one of the great war memoirs of all time. Blunden lets a scene speak for itself, understanding that sometimes fewer words mean greater impact. Following are some quotes that demonstrate his ability to describe a situation, and let the reader fill in for himself the psychological and emotional impact.
“Some of us were just in time, when next the enemy gunners whizzbanged here, to jump down from the fire-step into a dugout stairway; waiting there, I felt the air rush in hot tongues on us as shell after shell burst just at the exit.” (p. 26)
“To hear the beating of the gas tom-toms for many an acre, when the night mist lay heavily in the moonlight, traversing a silence and solitude beyond ordinary life, was fantastic enough. It was all a ghost story.” (p. 36)
“As we plodded down the dark hill, the blackness over by Thiepval Wood leapt alive with tossing flares, which made it seem a monstrous height, and with echo after echo in stammering mad pursuit the guns threshed that area; uncounted shells passed over with savage whipcracks, and travelled meteor-like with lines of flame through the brooding sultry air.” (p.68)
“The Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and earth, and life were much the same thing – and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison…. Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. Here we were to ‘hold the line,’ for an uncertain sentence of days.” (p. 98)
“we were ordered to relieve the 14th Hampshires in their position ahead, justly termed the Black Line, along the Steenbeck. The order presented no great intellectual difficulty, for our reduced battalion mere had to rise from its water-holes, plod through the mud of an already beaten track and crouch on the watch in other holes. Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us. Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante.” (p. 157)
“We were relieved in broad daylight, under every sort of observation, but nobody refused to move. The estimate of our casualties was 400, and although the real number was 280 or so, the battalion had had enough. When all my men had gone, including Sergeant Worley, who had been my fearless, tireless ‘second’ all the time, I found Sergeant Craddock, of the Orderly Room, also ready to depart. We stared over the ‘ornamental lakes,’ now a swamp with a dry crust of a surface, and tree-stubs here and there offering substantial foothold. Already there was a marked track across, and shells were thundering and smoking along it. Craddock seized his portfolios (the paper war always accompanied its rival) and I my belongings; we look silently at one another, and went. We immediately passed the bodies of two men just killed, the sweat on their faces, and with shouts of uncontrol we ran for life through the shell and the swamps. [Y]ou could almost feel the German gunners loading for you; we emerged short of breath.” (p. 170-171)
“During my leave, I remember principally observing the large decay of lively bright love of country, the crystallization of dull civilian hatred on the basis of ‘the last drop of blood’; the fact that the German air raids had persuaded my London friends that London was the sole battle front; the illusion that the British Army beyond Ypres was going from success to success; the ration system. The ration system. Perhaps the ration system weighted most upon us. This was not the ancient reward of the warrior! He had never had s sugar-card in Marlborough’s wars, or even 1916.” (p.162)
June 24, 2021
Not crazy about this book. I have read far more emotive accounts of the First World War. The writing is frequently dry and often sentences seemed clunky to me. Maybe it's just a disappointment compared to other books on the same subject
September 2, 2025
Terrible writing, almost no descriptions of anything. More than 100 years after the war I had to google so many things to know what he's talking about because of that. Wouldn't have read even one chapter if it wasn't for my studies.
July 14, 2016
Read for my third-year dissertation.
A good memoir, documenting Edmund Blunden's experience as a solider and poet during the First World War. It mentions a number of famous places such as Thiepval and Regina. One part of this I really liked was when he mentioned the name of the literature that helped me get through a very intense period inside the shelling.
For me to use academically, it focuses more on man's relationship with the landscape and what the war has done to the earth. Not applicable to my thesis, but interesting nonetheless.
A good memoir, documenting Edmund Blunden's experience as a solider and poet during the First World War. It mentions a number of famous places such as Thiepval and Regina. One part of this I really liked was when he mentioned the name of the literature that helped me get through a very intense period inside the shelling.
For me to use academically, it focuses more on man's relationship with the landscape and what the war has done to the earth. Not applicable to my thesis, but interesting nonetheless.
May 25, 2015
Blunden's autobiography, with a small selection of his poems in the back, was my companion on a two-week trip to Ypres and the Somme. It captured, in a way that no guidebook or museum could, the tediousness and randomness of life on the Western Front with all its terrifying sounds and smells and brief interludes of strangely normal existence behind the lines.
September 26, 2025
I read this as part of my degree studies and it was possibly the hardest book to read I've ever come across for a multitude of reasons.
Firstly, the language used and the structuring of the sentences was incredibly hard to decipher. It is of course a document of its era, almost 100 years ago and to modern readers like myself who tend not to delve into texts of this age, getting my head around it was difficult.
But of course the subject matter was also difficult. Reading of trenches lined with bones, finding boots with feet still in them, and the horror of friendly fire all significantly relayed the true Horrors of war.
The real power in this book though, comes from the 40 pages or so of poetry at the end. War poetry has always provoked strong emotions and these entries are no different.
The 3 star rating is purely down to the effort it took to understand the phrasing and how hard I had to work to absorb the knowledge. That of course is a reflection on me rather than the book, but despite my difficulties it is a book I encourage everyone to read.
Firstly, the language used and the structuring of the sentences was incredibly hard to decipher. It is of course a document of its era, almost 100 years ago and to modern readers like myself who tend not to delve into texts of this age, getting my head around it was difficult.
But of course the subject matter was also difficult. Reading of trenches lined with bones, finding boots with feet still in them, and the horror of friendly fire all significantly relayed the true Horrors of war.
The real power in this book though, comes from the 40 pages or so of poetry at the end. War poetry has always provoked strong emotions and these entries are no different.
The 3 star rating is purely down to the effort it took to understand the phrasing and how hard I had to work to absorb the knowledge. That of course is a reflection on me rather than the book, but despite my difficulties it is a book I encourage everyone to read.
October 8, 2025
Well, congrats to me on reading the book that’s been on my TBR list the longest… except I didn’t actually finish reading it. As other reviewers have noted, the writing style is formal and old-timey in a very bad way. The content is, against all odds, dull. So sorry, Ed, but you somehow made participation in a world war boring?
December 31, 2020
read this for school - i don't doubt that this is a seminal piece of writing when it comes to ww1 but i couldn't get into the writing style at all
December 15, 2024
Very interesting poetic, meandering account about Blundens horrific experiences in the trenches. Not an easy read though, a bit of a struggle, the war seen through a poets eyes.
March 23, 2021
it is not so easy to leave the front line... it has magnetized the mind; and for a moment one leans, delaying, looking out over the scene of war, and feeling that to break the horrid silence would be an act of creation.
king of war prose edmund blunden, ladies and gentlemen!!! wow. this feels like the end of an era,,, i've literally been reading this book for the past four months? and the reason it's taken me so long to finish is because i have THE biggest (and absurdest) crush on blunden and every other page of this book had me giggling and making notes in the margins and running off on ridiculously elaborate daydreams whilst i gazed out the window... needless to say i adore him. and i adore this book. for a war memoir it is extraordinarily funny, and sweet, and poetic in the extreme, everything i'd expect from the boy paul fussell names "the gentle ironist" of the great war <3 parts of the book were a bit dense with detail (my eyes did go out of focus many times i will admit), but what edmund lacks in accessibility at times he more than makes up for in charming the reader with self-deprecating asides and anecdotes and surfeits upon surfeits of exclamation points. gosh he is just... absolutely the best! certainly one of my favorite writers (and people) in the entire world <3
king of war prose edmund blunden, ladies and gentlemen!!! wow. this feels like the end of an era,,, i've literally been reading this book for the past four months? and the reason it's taken me so long to finish is because i have THE biggest (and absurdest) crush on blunden and every other page of this book had me giggling and making notes in the margins and running off on ridiculously elaborate daydreams whilst i gazed out the window... needless to say i adore him. and i adore this book. for a war memoir it is extraordinarily funny, and sweet, and poetic in the extreme, everything i'd expect from the boy paul fussell names "the gentle ironist" of the great war <3 parts of the book were a bit dense with detail (my eyes did go out of focus many times i will admit), but what edmund lacks in accessibility at times he more than makes up for in charming the reader with self-deprecating asides and anecdotes and surfeits upon surfeits of exclamation points. gosh he is just... absolutely the best! certainly one of my favorite writers (and people) in the entire world <3
December 20, 2019
I struggled with this book; assigned to me by my uni course. I am not a fan of war books in general, but more than that, it was the language that I found really difficult to plough through. The writing is so very dense; being a first-hand account of life in the trenches written by a poet. I am a lover of poetry, and yet I found Blunden's flowery, crowded prose a bit too poetic in nature to make for easy reading. Blunden was known to describe his memoir as a sort of long poem before; and the attention required to truly take in what the words are conveying is not dissimilar to poetic analysis. Sixty pages in I had all but admitted defeat, but a sleepless night found me persevering once more; never liking to abandon a text once begun.
Truly there are some beautiful passages, and I have full respect for Blunden and all that he witnessed in those horrifying years; not yet twenty when he first enlists. Some of his memories were moving... and horrific.
At the back of the book there was included a collection of Blunden's poems about the war.
They showcase his vocabulary and the breadth of his emotional reaction, but often feel contrived the way that so many old-fashioned and rhyming poems seem to me.
I am very interested in memoir writing just now, and so I will reflect upon what I learned from Blunden's text. I must say, however, that I have never before encountered a style quite like his, and I am not in a hurry to do so again.
Truly there are some beautiful passages, and I have full respect for Blunden and all that he witnessed in those horrifying years; not yet twenty when he first enlists. Some of his memories were moving... and horrific.
At the back of the book there was included a collection of Blunden's poems about the war.
They showcase his vocabulary and the breadth of his emotional reaction, but often feel contrived the way that so many old-fashioned and rhyming poems seem to me.
I am very interested in memoir writing just now, and so I will reflect upon what I learned from Blunden's text. I must say, however, that I have never before encountered a style quite like his, and I am not in a hurry to do so again.
September 27, 2013
My experience of WW 1 novelists and poets encompasses the greats; Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque. All of them had and inestimable impact upon me as both a veteran and an Australian. I was simply gripped and wrung out completely by what I read; it took me there, and together with my experience among the collections of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra it was all very personal. Blunden's work did not grip me in the same way, though there was much of the classically educated poet in evidence in some beautiful use of language to describe the indescribable and through that he was able to deliver the surrealistic nature of the war experience I felt his story only at arm's length. It was certainly a great piece of writing but for me it just lacked the visceral texture of the greats with whom I am so familiar. This may have had a lot to do with the impact the war had on Graves, Own and Sassoon. Sassoon was said to have constantly relived it every moment for the rest of his life, all suffering undoubtedly from what we now call ptsd. It may also have much to do with my personal response to me own war. Graves, Own, Sassoon and Remarque were seemingly on the same emotional page as I, and consequently what they had to say resonated for me.
Still any exploration of WW1 literature, or history for that matter should include this book for the great deal it does have to offer
Still any exploration of WW1 literature, or history for that matter should include this book for the great deal it does have to offer
December 4, 2023
Edmund Blunden wrote Undertones of War six years after WW1 concluded, when he was teaching in Japan. This has led some readers to question the historical accuracy of his work. He claimed that his account was composed with the assistance of just three old maps from the time. However, he had served as intelligence officer for his battalion. It was his responsibility to write an official war diary, which he presented as a meticulous record. Moreover, Blunden sent letters to his friends and relatives from the battlefields, and he composed a series of poems while he was serving in France. Perhaps his memory of events was shaped by each of these previous reflections. And, without question, the full horror which lies at the heart of his book would have left an indelible impression on his mind for rather longer than half a dozen years.
Although the narrative is composed retrospectively, Blunden's first person voice vividly conveys insights into his personality as well as life as a serving officer.
Blunden uses a variety of literary techniques to add atmosphere and poignancy to his descriptions. Metaphors abound, natural elements from the landscape become personified witnesses, both as victims of the war and antagonists. Trees, rivers, hillsides, fields, farmsteads, even the sky - all are embroiled in the battles. Death is never far from Blunden's accounts, but the camaraderie of the men and warmth of friendship is touchingly depicted, albeit nearly always overshadowed by the men's frailty.
Blunden doesn't attempt to mask the psychological impact of the war. Not does he follow Robert Graves' example and sensationalise it.
There are supernatural elements, for example, a white cloud which some interpret as a sword, others a cross. There are spooky elements, graphic horrors, and features from traditional ghost stories. For instance, at HQ the men see a face pass their window. They presume it is a spy, but as they rush outside they can find no trace of this apparition. No doubt many soldiers would have believed the shelled villages, woods and trenches were haunted, the countryside forever transformed by the war.
Blunden's writing is also crammed with disarmingly beautiful moments when he is lost among fleetingly pastoral distractions, the sun's warmth, the scent of a flower, or an insect's playful progress. Then there are the anti-pastoral descriptions depicting the butchered environment and nonstop bombardments. There are little details, partially buried skulls look like emerging mushrooms, alongside sweeping vistas of ruined views. The idyllic pleasure and tranquillity of what could suggest charming pastoral scenes are totally inverted, even the sky's grace is ironically ominous ahead of the following night's hounding devastation. Moreover, trenches are inhabited by skeletal remains, bodies lie in a still used latrine, and cheery, dutiful comrades are brutally killed moments after Blunden greets them. Such is the war.
Blunden's prose is elegant because of his poetic ear and command of language. His descriptions are formal, a quality which frames his account and embellishes his writing. This book expresses the tragedy and appalling waste of war in a touchingly personal, highly literary and utterly compelling version of events which will leave readers equally informed, shaken and changed by the power of Blunden's account.
Although the narrative is composed retrospectively, Blunden's first person voice vividly conveys insights into his personality as well as life as a serving officer.
Blunden uses a variety of literary techniques to add atmosphere and poignancy to his descriptions. Metaphors abound, natural elements from the landscape become personified witnesses, both as victims of the war and antagonists. Trees, rivers, hillsides, fields, farmsteads, even the sky - all are embroiled in the battles. Death is never far from Blunden's accounts, but the camaraderie of the men and warmth of friendship is touchingly depicted, albeit nearly always overshadowed by the men's frailty.
Blunden doesn't attempt to mask the psychological impact of the war. Not does he follow Robert Graves' example and sensationalise it.
There are supernatural elements, for example, a white cloud which some interpret as a sword, others a cross. There are spooky elements, graphic horrors, and features from traditional ghost stories. For instance, at HQ the men see a face pass their window. They presume it is a spy, but as they rush outside they can find no trace of this apparition. No doubt many soldiers would have believed the shelled villages, woods and trenches were haunted, the countryside forever transformed by the war.
Blunden's writing is also crammed with disarmingly beautiful moments when he is lost among fleetingly pastoral distractions, the sun's warmth, the scent of a flower, or an insect's playful progress. Then there are the anti-pastoral descriptions depicting the butchered environment and nonstop bombardments. There are little details, partially buried skulls look like emerging mushrooms, alongside sweeping vistas of ruined views. The idyllic pleasure and tranquillity of what could suggest charming pastoral scenes are totally inverted, even the sky's grace is ironically ominous ahead of the following night's hounding devastation. Moreover, trenches are inhabited by skeletal remains, bodies lie in a still used latrine, and cheery, dutiful comrades are brutally killed moments after Blunden greets them. Such is the war.
Blunden's prose is elegant because of his poetic ear and command of language. His descriptions are formal, a quality which frames his account and embellishes his writing. This book expresses the tragedy and appalling waste of war in a touchingly personal, highly literary and utterly compelling version of events which will leave readers equally informed, shaken and changed by the power of Blunden's account.
October 11, 2025
Like so many men who wrote memoirs of their WW1 experiences, Edmund Blunden was a poet. Unlike most of them, he wrote his memoirs in a style with a strong poetic flavor. While never reaching the levels of excess that marked, say, Hugh Quigley's memoirs (which are almost unreadable gibberish), there's no doubt Blunden wanted his words not merely to ring, but to sing. And they frequently do. Whether this method is truly effective for writing memoirs is another question entirely.
UNDERTONES is in a sense the diary of a very lucky man. Although he experienced plenty of horror, Blunden had a remarkable ability to be elsewhere when the worst massacres of the war took place. His leaves, his temporary reassignments to other units, his periods of training duty, always seemed to fortuitously coincide with such nature strolls as The Somme or Passchendaele. He is forever almost being killed by shells or blinded by gas or struck down by machine gun fire, but also forever avoiding circumstances which would almost certainly have killed him and which did kill so many of his friends and fellows. This wasn't evasion: it was simply Fate, or random chance. And through it all, he remains a distinctly, perhaps uniquely English entity: dry-witted, ironic, stuffed to the gills with Latin and Greek and altogether Classical references, an appreciator of nature and architecture, accepting of military life and its hazards and stupidities but unable to refrain from stinging commentary upon them.
UNDERTONES most reminds me of the worst of Ernst Jünger: not for his judgments on the nature of warfare, but for the half-poetical tone which is mixed up with all manner of philosophical and metaphysical observations. Blunden, like many of his class, had a massive education: unlike most of them he absorbed it and it flows out on every page through his observations. This was a man keenly interested by life and existence. He does not write for or against the war so much as document it through the eyes of a sensitive, thinking man, most of the conclusions being obvious (he has a genuine disgust for the aesthetics of war). His poems, adduced at the end of the book, are rather like his prose: there is a lot that left me uninterested and a small amount that shines like jewels. And that's how I regard this book: it's like mining for precious metals or stones. You sort of sift through a lot which is just there, or evokes little from you, but just often enough to keep you going, you find these precious fragments of lyrical prose which you collect and treasure.
Others may have a kinder judgment than I. I'm convinced books of this type are largely a matter of mood as much as taste where the reader is concerned. I was in the mood for spare, clearly evocative storytelling, and got prose-poetry which is often beautiful but more often turbid and inaccessible. Perhaps I was overly traumatized by reading Quigley's awful "A Diary of Passchendaele and The Somme," which is mostly fever-dream gibberish straining unsuccessfully for profundity, and never gave Blunden a fair hearing. I may have another go at this someday. Until then, three stars is as much as I can muster.
UNDERTONES is in a sense the diary of a very lucky man. Although he experienced plenty of horror, Blunden had a remarkable ability to be elsewhere when the worst massacres of the war took place. His leaves, his temporary reassignments to other units, his periods of training duty, always seemed to fortuitously coincide with such nature strolls as The Somme or Passchendaele. He is forever almost being killed by shells or blinded by gas or struck down by machine gun fire, but also forever avoiding circumstances which would almost certainly have killed him and which did kill so many of his friends and fellows. This wasn't evasion: it was simply Fate, or random chance. And through it all, he remains a distinctly, perhaps uniquely English entity: dry-witted, ironic, stuffed to the gills with Latin and Greek and altogether Classical references, an appreciator of nature and architecture, accepting of military life and its hazards and stupidities but unable to refrain from stinging commentary upon them.
UNDERTONES most reminds me of the worst of Ernst Jünger: not for his judgments on the nature of warfare, but for the half-poetical tone which is mixed up with all manner of philosophical and metaphysical observations. Blunden, like many of his class, had a massive education: unlike most of them he absorbed it and it flows out on every page through his observations. This was a man keenly interested by life and existence. He does not write for or against the war so much as document it through the eyes of a sensitive, thinking man, most of the conclusions being obvious (he has a genuine disgust for the aesthetics of war). His poems, adduced at the end of the book, are rather like his prose: there is a lot that left me uninterested and a small amount that shines like jewels. And that's how I regard this book: it's like mining for precious metals or stones. You sort of sift through a lot which is just there, or evokes little from you, but just often enough to keep you going, you find these precious fragments of lyrical prose which you collect and treasure.
Others may have a kinder judgment than I. I'm convinced books of this type are largely a matter of mood as much as taste where the reader is concerned. I was in the mood for spare, clearly evocative storytelling, and got prose-poetry which is often beautiful but more often turbid and inaccessible. Perhaps I was overly traumatized by reading Quigley's awful "A Diary of Passchendaele and The Somme," which is mostly fever-dream gibberish straining unsuccessfully for profundity, and never gave Blunden a fair hearing. I may have another go at this someday. Until then, three stars is as much as I can muster.
July 30, 2025
This is probably the best memoire of WW1 that I’ve read to date. Edmund Blunden is a wizard who casts spells with words. Irony. Wit. The Sublime. The Ridiculous. These and all other manifestations of erudite and intelligent observation constitute the stuff of dreams that are his story. This is a fine and highly polished piece.
Indeed, one almost suspects it is too finely crafted. Published in 1928, Blunden has had ample time to work and re-work and perfect his prose, presumably in the comfort of his book-lined bureau at Oxford. I can’t help but wonder upon what contemporaneous documents—a diary perhaps?—he based his fondly polished recollections.
Not that doing so undermines or delegitimizes his work. After all, one’s immediate reactions to unkindly fate’s slings and arrows are never the last word on the matter. If time softens and blurs the painful edges of experience, isn’t life essentially a long process of understanding and incorporating into our own identities the effects and after-effects, the perfumes, so to speak, of long-forgotten teas and madeleines? We become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
And I don’t detect any effort on the author’s part to re-write history, to make himself out a hero or to cover up some discreditable episode in his past. His brief love with the French girl in the back of a farmer’s wagon might have raised eyebrows once (was she really only 14 and he near 21?), but I find myself quite happy for both of them. Still, I do hope he left her a few sous for her troubles (a girl’s got to eat, after all) and I wonder if her memory of the encounter is as tinged with that gauzy and golden unsurpassable ‘sadness of tongue or pen’ as is his…
In any case, I found this book quite enchanting. Someone who’d interviewed a fair number of veterans many decades after the Great War commented that, terrible as it was, they were almost to a man glad that they had been a part of it and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I almost wish I could have been there too, although I’m sure that a glimpse of war from behind the curtain of time is rather different from the real thing.
Indeed, one almost suspects it is too finely crafted. Published in 1928, Blunden has had ample time to work and re-work and perfect his prose, presumably in the comfort of his book-lined bureau at Oxford. I can’t help but wonder upon what contemporaneous documents—a diary perhaps?—he based his fondly polished recollections.
Not that doing so undermines or delegitimizes his work. After all, one’s immediate reactions to unkindly fate’s slings and arrows are never the last word on the matter. If time softens and blurs the painful edges of experience, isn’t life essentially a long process of understanding and incorporating into our own identities the effects and after-effects, the perfumes, so to speak, of long-forgotten teas and madeleines? We become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
And I don’t detect any effort on the author’s part to re-write history, to make himself out a hero or to cover up some discreditable episode in his past. His brief love with the French girl in the back of a farmer’s wagon might have raised eyebrows once (was she really only 14 and he near 21?), but I find myself quite happy for both of them. Still, I do hope he left her a few sous for her troubles (a girl’s got to eat, after all) and I wonder if her memory of the encounter is as tinged with that gauzy and golden unsurpassable ‘sadness of tongue or pen’ as is his…
In any case, I found this book quite enchanting. Someone who’d interviewed a fair number of veterans many decades after the Great War commented that, terrible as it was, they were almost to a man glad that they had been a part of it and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I almost wish I could have been there too, although I’m sure that a glimpse of war from behind the curtain of time is rather different from the real thing.
June 15, 2020
One of the main issues with Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden is it's sheer tedium. I'll keep this review brief but there wasn't a lot that I took away from Blunden's work.
Essentially, it's a stuttering, disjointed, memoir of an officers time in the First World War. At times, there is barely enough time to read one sentence, before the narrative moves on to something else entirely. There are occasional passages in which Blunden waxes lyrical but this is always in relation to his environment and nearly always in relation to something that would be otherwise trivial. The characterisation is close to zero, the narrative is utterly unengaging and the ability of Blunden to allow you inside his head is again, almost non-existent.
Poetic passages cannot be effective if they are awash in a sea of otherwise weak prose, which very much felt the case with this work. It really shows that Blunden was relying on memory here - it's as though he has just jotted down some notes and flung them together in a hotch-potch fashion, with the odd eloquently written passage thrown in the mix. Blunden uses his poetic skill to it's fullest effect at times; the problem however is less to do with his prowess in describing for example, the sights and sounds of war, and an awful lot to do with his inability to convey how it felt to be there, part of which stems from the fact that the narrative threads just do not knit together coherently.
By all means give this a bash....it must be for someone but I can say categorically that it just didn't work at all for me.
Essentially, it's a stuttering, disjointed, memoir of an officers time in the First World War. At times, there is barely enough time to read one sentence, before the narrative moves on to something else entirely. There are occasional passages in which Blunden waxes lyrical but this is always in relation to his environment and nearly always in relation to something that would be otherwise trivial. The characterisation is close to zero, the narrative is utterly unengaging and the ability of Blunden to allow you inside his head is again, almost non-existent.
Poetic passages cannot be effective if they are awash in a sea of otherwise weak prose, which very much felt the case with this work. It really shows that Blunden was relying on memory here - it's as though he has just jotted down some notes and flung them together in a hotch-potch fashion, with the odd eloquently written passage thrown in the mix. Blunden uses his poetic skill to it's fullest effect at times; the problem however is less to do with his prowess in describing for example, the sights and sounds of war, and an awful lot to do with his inability to convey how it felt to be there, part of which stems from the fact that the narrative threads just do not knit together coherently.
By all means give this a bash....it must be for someone but I can say categorically that it just didn't work at all for me.
December 14, 2020
Very colourfully written, the description throughout is very evocative of trench warfare. Although Bluden avoids describing in bitter detail the gruesomeness, his wider description of the terrain and the effects of shelling on those in the trenches show how horrific it must have been.
It is humble throughout, Blunden avoids mentioning his Military Cross award or heaping any glory on himself; he seems much more interested in how the landscape suffers from the war which he blames much more on the top brass than he does the German.
We don't see much characterisation, Bluden is writing from memory 10+ years after the event, we are told with only the aid of two self-made maps. He doesn't try to recreate conversations or fill in blanks; we are told directly that some events may be out of sequence due to the effects of memory, this all gives the memoir a very honest appeal. The 31 poems included after the 191 page memoir are also worth reading even for those not interested in poetry as they do correspond to events in the memoir.
It might be disappointing reading for those who want to know about deployments, strategic decisions, specific dates, locations and unit dispositions as little of that is included, it's a trench-level view of conflict, perhaps quite different to most military memoirs.
It is humble throughout, Blunden avoids mentioning his Military Cross award or heaping any glory on himself; he seems much more interested in how the landscape suffers from the war which he blames much more on the top brass than he does the German.
We don't see much characterisation, Bluden is writing from memory 10+ years after the event, we are told with only the aid of two self-made maps. He doesn't try to recreate conversations or fill in blanks; we are told directly that some events may be out of sequence due to the effects of memory, this all gives the memoir a very honest appeal. The 31 poems included after the 191 page memoir are also worth reading even for those not interested in poetry as they do correspond to events in the memoir.
It might be disappointing reading for those who want to know about deployments, strategic decisions, specific dates, locations and unit dispositions as little of that is included, it's a trench-level view of conflict, perhaps quite different to most military memoirs.
February 14, 2023
Poet Edmund Blunden, writing in the first-person, contributes an eye-witness account of his time on the Western Front during World War I … evocative of the sights, smells, and sorrows of that unique period … includes a Supplement of his war poetry … worthy to be classed with Robert Graves’ “Good-bye to All That” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Memoirs of George Sherston …
by
Robert Graves
by
Siegfried Sassoon
by
Robert Graves
by
Siegfried Sassoon
March 18, 2024
How do you write about a war too big, too loud, too violent, too brutal for you to comprehend? You can only write down what you saw, with no understanding as to what's more or less important to report.
Do not read this to get an idea of the battles or the happenings of World War I. There's no 'straight', easy to follow story here, only impressions heaped on impressions like corpses. How could he have made any sense?
It was Geoffrey Salter speaking out firmly in the darkness. Stuff Trench - this was Stuff Trench; three feet deep, corpses under foot, corpses on the parapet. He told us, while still shell after shell slipped in crescendo wailing into the vibrating ground, that his brother had been killed, and he had buried him; Ivens - poor "I won't bloody well have it sergeant-major" Ivens - was killed; Doogan had been wounded, gone downstairs into one of the dugout shafts after hours of sweat, and a shell had come downstairs to finish him; " and," says he, "you can get a marvellous view of Grandcourt from this trench. We've been looking at it all day. Where's these men? Let me put 'em into the posts. No, you wait a bit, I'll see to it. That the sergeant-major?"
Do not read this to get an idea of the battles or the happenings of World War I. There's no 'straight', easy to follow story here, only impressions heaped on impressions like corpses. How could he have made any sense?
November 25, 2019
At this time of the year, I endeavour to read something of the ordeals of those men who gave so much to honour their country by showing that comradeship & fellow-feeling can survive even the Great War.Edmund Blunden's memoir & poetry, here combined offer such a tribute to the courage & solidarity of his brother officers & men, that I felt the sincerity even amongst the random death & devastation of the Western Front...on the first day of the Somme...in the vortex of blood that was Passchaendale...& at Ypres...which tore at the very souls as well as the flesh & bones of predominantly young men who we must remember as examples to us all. We must live for each other...& for those who 'gave' their lives so that others might live.
Blunden lived long...but never forgot the men who didn't. His poetry is amongst the finest, eschewing the bitterness of Owen or Sassoon, preferring a more nuanced reflection of those experiences that made him such a fine writer. Few men today can know that anguish; a sense of futility perhaps...but we must prevail against the forces of human folly. Edmund Blunden prevailed.
Blunden lived long...but never forgot the men who didn't. His poetry is amongst the finest, eschewing the bitterness of Owen or Sassoon, preferring a more nuanced reflection of those experiences that made him such a fine writer. Few men today can know that anguish; a sense of futility perhaps...but we must prevail against the forces of human folly. Edmund Blunden prevailed.
January 8, 2024
Reread after a long gap. An excellent memoir from one of the best and most accessible Great War poets. Written in 1928 it is somewhat episodic rather than a day to day accounts but Blunden is very detailed with locations and for example trench names are used which means exact locations can be found and the unit’s actions traced. Blunden himself comes across as a very likeable character with a wry sense of self deprecating humour and a keen eye. Perhaps not an ideal infantry officer he appears to have pushed the boundaries of dissent, even in a New Army battalion, but was brave and lucky, winning the MC in an underplayed incident. While not hiding the violence and sheer horror of battles like Passchendaele he contrasts this with the obvious satisfaction he got from serving and justified pride in his Battalion and the comradeship of serving with his friends which drew him back to the front line.
The book also contains a number of his poems which as a non expert I rather enjoy more than the “horror” ones of Sassoon and Owen which I think give a rather distorted view of a conflict which continues to resonate.
The book also contains a number of his poems which as a non expert I rather enjoy more than the “horror” ones of Sassoon and Owen which I think give a rather distorted view of a conflict which continues to resonate.
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