UNDERTONES OF WAR

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

Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence –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. 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." 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. 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."

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)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. 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. 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’…

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. 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. Author, 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. 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;

To really understand this you have to read it a few times. Mr Blundens casual observations of everyday life while waging a war are acute and relentless. 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. 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." 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) 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.

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."

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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. 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. 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. 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.