UNDERTONES OF WAR

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Blunden was not a natural soldier and he loathed the war, yet it haunted him for the rest of his days.

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. 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.

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In late 1916 his brigade moved north into the Ypres Salient. Blunden’s description of life in the Salient is vivid and memorable. The Germans surrounded the city of Ypres on three sides, north, south, and east. Furthermore, they held the high ground so they had direct observation into every part of the city. They had registered mortars and artillery on every point where British troops might assemble, and kept up a continuous bombardment. The British lived in cellars and dugouts with the knowledge that a hit by a heavy shell would collapse the roof and bury them. For months Blundens’ brigade would alternate weeks in the trenches, in the snow, freezing mud, and bitter cold, with a troglodyte life underground in Ypres, and occasional spells farther behind the line to train and refit. 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. 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.” 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." This is different to many of the other memoirs I have read, there is no getting to know other characters in any depth, but there are many memorable moments, including the poignant and well known last sentence;

To cheat death while all around men are dying is not lost on Mr BLunden, to live to tell of the destruction of men is not taken lightly. 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." 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.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. 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. 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. Undertones of War is a 1928 memoir of the First World War, written by English poet Edmund Blunden. As with two other famous war memoirs-— Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That-- Undertones represents Blunden's first prose publication, [1] and was one of the earliest contributors to the flurry of Great War books to come out of England in the late 1920s and early 1930s. [2] Synopsis [ edit ] 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.