UNDERTONES OF WAR

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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’… 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." 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; 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.” 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.

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

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