Undertones of War

In 1930 War Books, a critical guide to published writings on the Great War, was published. In it the Dublin-born author, Cyril Falls, both a veteran and an official historian of the war, rated each publication, awarding one star for good, two for very good and three for “of superlative merit”. One of those to achieve the accolade of three stars was Undertones of War by the poet Edmund Blunden (born 1 November 1896). Falls considered it a masterpiece.

Blunden's coming of age as an acclaimed poet coincided with his war service with the Royal Sussex Regiment on the Western Front. At Givenchy he was summoned to battalion headquarters:
“A review of my poems has been printed in the Times Literary Supplement (a kind review it was, if ever there was one!) and my Colonel has seen it and is overjoyed at having an actual author in his battalion.”
He relates also that a General “had done me the honour to read” a manuscript of his poems about Ypres and “had perused them with interest”. Whereas many of his war poems were written while he was at the Front, his prose reminiscences in Undertones of War were written in 1924 in a hotel room in Tokyo where he had gone to be professor of English literature in the Imperial University.

While on the Western Front, Blunden was not only writing poems but also drawing comfort and inspiration from the poetry of others. He was guided through a time of heightened danger and risk of death by the words of Edward Young, an English poet of the 18th century:
“... bullets began to strike round the entrance of my pillbox, as if the Germans had advanced their machine-guns. We were supposed to have been making advances on this front, too. During this period my indebtedness to an 18th-century poet became enormous. At every spare moment I read in Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality and I felt the benefit of this grave and intellectual voice, speaking out of a profound 18th-century calm, often in metaphor which came home to one even in a pillbox. The mere amusement of discovering lines applicable to our crisis kept me from despair.”


As an old man, Blunden admitted that his mind had never properly left the battlefield behind:
“My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.”