Undertones of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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.” 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.

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) 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.Do I loiter too long among little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased for me to be big or little . . .Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm. He spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents, which characterized the time. The art is rather to collect them,in their original form of incoherence."

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. By 1917 Blunden had lost many old friends and he was tired of war. Not even the "huge old trees, the grass and herbs" could raise his spirits. Undertones of War shows how he longed for what he calls "the fragrance of ancient peace," as evidenced in the following lines: In October 1919 Blunden took up his deferred place at Oxford. Although he made friends among the aspiring writers in the university, many of them ex-servicemen like himself, he found it hard to settle and to support his family. In 1920 he left Oxford to take up a part-time editorial post at the journal 'The Athenaeum', (later incorporated into 'The Nation' then into the 'New Statesman'). Blunden published collections of his poems: The Waggoner (1920); and The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War (April 1922) which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. He was recognized as a young writer of great promise.McPhail, Helen, and Philip Guest. Edmund Blunden. Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England: Cooper, 1999. A biography of Blunden that examines his life and works, focusing on his war writings. Having witnessed these landscapes, it is small wonder that Blunden the poet (and he was primarily a poet throughout his life) would later write these lines in his poem "The Sunlit Vale": They hid what daily grew plain enough—the knowledge that the war had released them only for a few moments, that the war would reclaim them, that the war was a jealous war and a long-lasting. Throughout the horrors, Blunden remained a poetic "shepherd." He was never a soldier at heart. He survived the war, left the army in 1919, and took up the scholarship to Oxford that he had won while still at school. A writer and countryman at heart, Blunden loathed war; at the same time, it was also the source of some of his most important works, including Undertones of War. The Folio Society edition contains not only the earlier mentioned poems but also the memoir that is the foundation of Undertones of War, namely De Bello Germanico, written directly after the war but never finished. Undertones of War is the story of a survivor who, remarkably, managed to retain the qualities of a shepherd amidst the unprecedented horrors of modern warfare. Blunden died in 1974. 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:

In 1918 Blunden wrote a prose account of his experiences, 'De Bello Germanico: a fragment of trench history'. However he was not satisfied with it and only published it privately in 1930. 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.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. Today, the collective memory of the Great War is largely synthesized into some brief notions: it wasn’t the “War to end all Wars”, the men were “lions led by donkeys”, it was awful and it should never have happened but there was a football match in No Man’s Land at Christmas. And of course, the Second World War has intervened, to change the meaning of the shadow that war has cast over European history in the twentieth century. Reading the memoirs, of all three of the principal combatant nations on the Western Front, reminds us that these notions are far from an adequate version of the experiences that men had there. In texts like these we see the extremes: Barbusse’s text is a slow descent into an apocalyptic vision…Jünger, to the contrary, is the archetypal ‘happy warrior’…driven by blood lust. Cross, Tim, ed. Lost Voices of World War I. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. A moving anthology of poetry and other short works by writers who were killed in the conflict. It includes a fine introduction by Robert Wohl, a leading scholar of modernism, who offers valuable insight into how Blunden’s British contemporaries felt about literature and the role it plays in society.

In May 1916 he was sent to the Western Front and served with the 11th Royal Sussex regiment. He saw action in the trenches at Festubert, Cuinchy, and Richebourg. Later in 1916 Blunden was awarded the Military Cross for his 'conspicuous gallantry in action' during the Battle of the Somme. He served in the Ypres salient, and on 31st July 1917 he took part in the Third Battle of Ypres, the beginning of the Passchendaele offensive. Blunden survived for two years in the front lines. However he was not untouched by his service, and was greatly affected by the loss of several of his friends. I know that memory has her little ways, and by now she has concealed precisely that look, that word, that coincidence of nature without and nature within which I long to remember. . . I must go over the ground again. A voice, perhaps not my own, answers within me. You will be going over the ground again, it says, until that hour when agony's clawed face softens the smilingness of a young spring day. Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. 1965. Reprint. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1996. Bergonzi’s book was one of the first critical studies of its subject written for the nonacademic. This work postulates that British writers represented the war in terms of a “complex fusion of tradition and unprecedented reality.”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."