I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!” I found myself pillaging my mothers collection of books after she had fallen out of favour with them. 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) 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.

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.” 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. 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. 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.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.

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.

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.” 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. 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.