Undertones of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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; Blunden was a cautious and even-handed critic who regularly turned to neglected figures in English literature and history in an effort to give them the recognition he thought they deserved. At Peterborough and Northampton he discovered collections of manuscripts by the 19th-century peasant poet John Clare, and with the help of his friend Alan Porter he published John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript(1920), which repudiates the misjudgments and falsifications of previous scholars and argues for Clare’s importance to English literature. Similarly, in his edition of Christopher Smart’s A Song to David with Other Poems(1924) he expresses the hope that Smart’s masterpiece will become “as familiar as [Milton’s poem] ‘L’Allegro.’” For Blunden, criticism was almost always more a matter of expanding the literary canon than of further cultivating familiar fields. Though he wrote on the major Romantics, including a 1946 biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on Thomas Hardy, his most characteristic criticism focuses on comparatively understudied figures such as William Collins, William Cobbett, Robert Southey, Thomas Hood, and Michael Drayton. As Alec Hardie points out, nearly every author Blunden writes about has “some personal reason for deserving sympathy as a man: prolonged ill-health, madness, suicide, or some inability to deal with the circumstances of his time.” Alec Hardie notes that Blunden “is temperamentally unwilling to show other than sympathy; he makes a real attempt to meet an author on his own level, to know what he is trying to say, and not to force prejudices upon a victim. Rightly he has the reputation of a kindly critic, preferring to find the authors’ qualities and to gloss over faults 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": 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. 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.

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.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. 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. Scupham, Peter. “Edmund Blunden.” In British Writers: Supplement XI, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006. A basic biography and analysis of Blunden’s works. And then, of course, there are the poems. Blunden included – in his own slightly arch, self-deprecatory term – ‘A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’; here, with welcome directness, Greening adds thirty or so more. Recognising how the poetry and prose often interact, and taking his lead from Blunden’s son-in law Martin Chown (in his Companion Guide to Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War), Greening also links these additional poems chapter by chapter to the text of Undertones. They provide yet further evidence of a half-century spent revisiting the war. Typically, however, Blunden also notes that "not all hours were poisonous. The summer afternoon sometimes stole past unmolested." His descriptions in Chapter Eight, "The Calm," of Lacouture and Cuinchy are almost idyllic and include such evocative phrases as "drowsy summer's yellow haze." Chapter Fifteen, "Theatre of War," however, tells the other and more obvious side of the story. The front line, for example, is described as "crude and inhuman," the cold is "foul" and the threat of ambush ever present.

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.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)