UNDERTONES OF WAR

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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. I found myself pillaging my mothers collection of books after she had fallen out of favour with them. 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 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.

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." 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. 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.

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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’. 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. Blunden was not a natural soldier and he loathed the war, yet it haunted him for the rest of his days. 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)

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. In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”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.