Literary Picks

Author: Edward Pickering

Edmund Blunden is not among the most famous poets of the First World War, a distinction reserved for Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and possibly Edward Thomas. Blunden, it is fair to say, dispels a gentler light than these luminaries. His poetry is not so widely read as theirs and his memoir, "Undertones of War," is all but forgotten. However, in 1928, Blunden's memoir sold out on the day of its first appearance.

We are accustomed to graphic accounts of warfare, to a brutal realism in which shrapnel fragments and gut-wrenching terror are rendered in intimate detail. We regard as suspicious or false all war chronicles that do not conform in this respect. "Undertones of War" will put off contemporary readers, but they would be foolish and unfair to criticize the work on grounds that it does not meet their expectations. The memoir offers great rewards to those who persevere. It offers a unique testimony whose very strength is its narrowness and concentration. Reading the memoir is something like viewing the war through a tiny shard of stained glass. That heavily tinctured shard is the poetic sensibility of a young man who discovered tranquility and beauty even amidst the carnage.

Though he describes entrenchments, offensives and the like in great and conscientious detail, Blunden concentrates not on the intricacies and horror of battle so much as the moments away from battle. Blunden served gallantly in the trenches but he lived in the tranquil fields and silent copses, dignified chateaux and peaceful villages of the landscape behind those trenches. The key to understanding and appreciating Blunden rests in the opening word of the title - "Undertones." Blunden celebrates the natural beauty and seasonal variance of life on the verge of the war. When withdrawn from the frontlines for temporary rest, training or redeployment, Blunden often found himself in untouched countryside and untroubled hamlets. Though death was always near, hovering in the air like the report of artillery, Blunden managed to find a measure of solace, to stumble upon moments of pure happiness.

"The day was gloomy, but to be "stepping westward" among common things of life made it light enough. [ . . .] We passed over hills still green, and by mossy cottages, with onions drying under the eaves. It was as though war forgot some corners of Flanders. (Next year war, remembered that corner with a vengeance.)"

A shy, gentle Englishman, only 20 at the time of his service, Blunden endured some of the war's worst engagements, including the Somme and Ypres. Miraculously he survived without a single physical wound. Possessed of a deep poetic urge, Blunden wrote and published several volumes of verse during the war. The style in which "Undertones of War" is written may strike readers as florid and distancing- a poetic gloss of horrid realities, an especial hostile critic might say. Admittedly, Blunden's prose fares ill by today's standards of taste. Like a poem, the memoir demands re-perusal and mulling over, not slapdash page-turning.