By 1928, a full ten years after the end of the First World War, some publishers were coming to the conclusion that the public’s interest in war literature was on the wane. They were wrong. The majority of those books that now constitute the war’s literary canon appeared in the next two or three years – among them Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (published in Germany in 1928 and translated into English in 1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (which came out in 1930). Cobden-Sanderson, the publishers of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, were among those caught unawares by this surge in sales. Between its first appearance in November 1928 and September 1929 Undertones of War went through seven impressions. The literature of the First World War, a fusion of memoir, autobiography and fictionalized versions of both, was not just a testament of personal experience. It was also the cri de coeur of a generation, some of whom had struggled to return from the war, at least in mind. As Blunden himself put it in 1934, ‘we who had been brought up to it were lost men’.1 For a decade the best of them had been letting their ideas gestate, as they assimilated and exorcized what they had undergone, and as they sought the vocabulary that could best capture and communicate the inexpressible.
In 1930 Cyril Falls, both a veteran and an official historian of the First World War, tried to take stock of ‘the spilling of floods of ink as well as of blood’ in War Books, a critical guide to the works of all genres that the events of 1914–18 had produced. He used a rating system which awarded one star for a good book, two for a very good one, and three ‘for a book of superlative merit’. He deployed the latter sparingly. However, he was not mean in his praise of Undertones of War, which not only earned three stars, but was also described as ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘the best English book of its kind’. (Falls rightly categorized Blunden’s book as ‘reminiscence’; those who have treated it as fiction have missed the point. Undertones of War is peopled by real characters, who went where Blunden said they went and did what he said they did.) ‘The book,’ Falls wrote, ‘is first of all an almost perfect picture of the small events which made up the siege warfare of France and Flanders.’2
Falls likened Undertones of War to a Rembrandt. The simile was particularly apt: ‘Rembrandtesque’ was an adjective that Blunden himself used more than once. But what was it meant to convey? Rembrandt’s paintings have richness, depth and subtlety. Falls contrasted the reception accorded to Undertones of War, however respectful, with the runaway success of All Quiet on the Western Front. The latter was, in Falls’s pictorial metaphor, a Doré, ‘a good novel of the more brutal naturalistic school’. As Blunden’s readers have themselves become more distanced from the events that he describes, and have also become the victims of clichés concerning the war’s undoubted horrors as well as its perceived futility, so have they become less attuned to the qualities of a Rembrandt. With their visions of war simplified by cinema, they want their categories firmly etched and their preconceptions confirmed. Works like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which Blunden disliked as cordially as did Siegfried Sassoon (and which has sufficient factual errors to give it a much greater claim to be treated as fiction for all its apparently autobiographical approach), have resonated better with the expectations of later generations, and have required less imaginative effort. Graves set out to shock; Blunden’s approach was more oblique. For Blunden, war contained horror and humour, waste and honour, boredom and intensity, intellectual isolation and profound comradeship. ‘War’s classical name,’ Blunden wrote to his mother in 1918, ‘should have been Proteus.’3
In Greek legend, Proteus could alter his shape at will. The challenge was how to convey war’s varied and rapidly changing characteristics to those who had never experienced it. In 1928, Blunden not only doubted whether he could do so but was also unsure whether he wanted to. Bridging the gap in understanding between those who had served in the war and those who had not created the danger of misrepresentation, of putting events in terms which might resonate with a wider public but might jar with the veteran. ‘No one will read it,’ he stated in his original preface to Undertones of War, ‘who is not already aware of all the intimations and discoveries in it, and many more, by reason of having gone the same journey.’ Undertones of War, he suggested, is a book for the initiated, as those who have not gone ‘the same journey’ will not understand it. For today’s reader, that is both an obstacle and a challenge: an obstacle because Blunden only had to hint at things for this fellow veterans to recall the smells, sights and sounds of their youths, but we – the uninitiated – need them spelled out; and a challenge, because if we are to understand the true complexion of the western front the onus is on us to endeavour to overcome that hurdle.
The effort is particularly worthwhile (and particularly necessary) because Blunden went to war not simply as an adolescent on the threshold of adulthood, but also as a poet. His first slim volumes of verse were published in early 1916, and a review of one of them in the Times Literary Supplement was noticed by his commanding officer (a regular soldier of education and sensibility – another stereotype undermined). Poetry became the means by which he thought through his own reactions to the war as he lived it. ‘I was almost a poet of the shell-holes, of ruin and mystification’, he later recalled. His immediate post-war efforts to deal with the issues of the war, his guilt at surviving and his sense of rootlessness, were also poetic, modelled on Wordsworth’s Prelude.4 Poems, however, were not the only vehicles which he used to order his thoughts in wartime; he also kept diaries and he wrote letters. His correspondence with his mother is particularly frank about the horrors and frustrations of the war, and gives the lie to those who argue that soldiers, in their anxiety to protect their loved ones at home from worry, exercised self-censorship in their communications from the front line. Twice during 1917 he was also responsible for maintaining the battalion’s war diary, a lapidary and official record of its doings.
The creation of Undertones of War, the business of turning experience into words, of venting feelings in verse, began during the war itself. In 1918, having been sent home in February, he wrote a prose account of the events of 1916, which he called De Bello Germanico, in emulation of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, a book which he had taken with him when he first went to the front. De Bello Germanico was eventually published by his brother in 1930, but Blunden wanted greater distance between him and the war before committing himself definitively to print. He found it not only through the passage of time. In 1924 he went to Japan, to be professor of English literature at the Imperial University in Tokyo. He wrote Undertones of War in a hotel room, with no other sources to hand beyond a couple of trench maps. No published history of Blunden’s unit exists beyond a brief summary he wrote himself in 1933, but it is clear that those with whom he served regarded Undertones of War as an accurate and judicious chronicle of events.
This does not mean that Blunden saw himself as a historian. He remained true to his primary vocation. The text of Undertones of War is studded with references to poets (some of them obscure) and with poetic allusions. Blunden’s own poems at the end of the book are an integral part of the text, many of them reflections on, and amplifications of, episodes mentioned in the prose account. Moreover, the style of the latter is itself poetic, with – in the words of another poet, Jon Stallworthy – ‘its archaisms, syntactic inversions and compound adjectives’.5 Blunden himself said in later life that he intended it to be considered as ‘a sort of long poem’.6
Many of Blunden’s war poems are identified by place names, a device which links them to the events with which they are concerned. Blunden’s precision about location, expressed in his eye for landscape, his sympathetic descriptions of flora and fauna, and his verbal renderings of buildings, also gives unity and precision to Undertones of War. The fact that his only props in the book’s composition were cartographic is therefore significant. The reader can follow Blunden’s movements on the map, while the author himself suffuses his text with the rural themes of the pastoral tradition which his poetry had embraced before the war. Blunden did not feel impelled by the war to find a new way of expression, as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen did. Instead the war led him to combine the pastoral with the military, and the military with the pastoral. About twenty of the poems that Blunden wrote during the war have survived; others were lost in the mud of Ypres. Many more were written in its aftermath, including those specifically crafted for Undertones of War, and he never completely abandoned the war as a theme. Inspired by his visits to the battlefields, he probably wrote ‘Ancre sunshine’ in 1966, described by George Walter as ‘the last war poem to be published by any survivor of the war’.7
Edmund Blunden therefore fits a set of received images of a First World War author, at least one from England. Born in London in 1896, his family moved to Yalding, in Kent, when his father became the headmaster of its Church of England primary school. Here Blunden became both enamoured of rural simplicity and aware of its imminent demise. In 1909 he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, and so moved to the adjacent county of Sussex. The school honed his skills as a cricketer and a calligrapher, and he formed friendships which were carried through into the army. He remained a devoted ‘Old Blue’ for the rest of his life. In 1916 he dedicated his fi rst two volumes of poetry to Leigh Hunt and John Clare, the fi rst of whom had been at the school (as had Coleridge, after whom Blunden’s boarding house was named).
In 1915, having waited until he had finished his school career in order to secure a place at Oxford, he joined the 11th Battalion, the Royal Sussex Regiment. Service in the Christ’s Hospital Officers’ Training Corps was compulsory, but ‘his gentle ways and his unassuming manner’ meant, in the words of the 11th’s commanding officer, that he ‘was not born to be a soldier,’ but ‘became one in spite of himself ’.8 The 11th Royal Sussex was the first of three ‘New Army’ battalions, recruited by voluntary enlistment, which the War Office authorized Claude Lowther MP to raise at the beginning of September 1914. Known collectively as ‘Lowther’s Lambs’ or the ‘Southdown Brigade’, the three battalions were united by their geographical origins but were also symptomatic of what Keith Grieves has called a type of ‘pseudo-ruralism’. Lowther’s family hailed not from Sussex (where his links only extended back to 1911), but from Cumberland, and as many of those who joined the Southdown battalions came from the seaside towns of the south coast as from the farming communities inland.9 In Blunden’s account there is a refreshing sense of fellow-feeling between officers and noncommissioned officers. In 1928 he wrote to Sassoon of the pleasure he had in meeting again ‘the old hands… most of them well and full of character, still unaware that they had reached the outward limits of human idealism and still such masters of themselves as to treat their old offi cers as officers, and with courtesy like Philip Sidney’s’.10 On these occasions Blunden renewed his friendship with Sergeant Frank Worley, who had worked as a butcher before the war and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal during it, a friendship which then lasted until Worley’s death in 1954.
Although the 11th’s commanding officers were regular soldiers with pre-war experience, they showed themselves adept at working with the rather different social grain of a New Army battalion. Lieutenant-Colonel H. J. Grisewood took the 11th out to France, but was removed from the command on 24 June 1916, after he queried an order from brigade to carry out a raid on the enemy line at a point ‘fortified with the keenest intelligence, the thickest wire and emplacements, in the dark and without preparation’. These are Blunden’s own words describing the incident in Undertones of War. His visceral dislike of trench raids is a feature of the book, criticism which was undoubtedly merited if the circumstances were as he said them to be in this instance, but which failed to recognize the broader arguments for raids, including the need for intelligence and the desire to break up what was identified at the time and by Blunden as the ‘live and let live system’, a tacit acceptance by both sides not to disturb the routines of trench warfare by aggressive action. Senior officers were legitimately worried that inactivity could lapse into passivity, that fraternization would curb the conduct of offensive operations, and that moral superiority over the enemy would be forfeit.
Grisewood was succeeded by George Harrison, who had come from the Border Regiment, was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and rose to become a brigadier-general. ‘A saint without a halo’,11 he was both a good friend to Blunden and a ‘father’ to his battalion (to use the appellation for successful commanding officers preferred in the pre-war regular army and in the 11th too). Blunden, writing in 1932, described the battalion as ‘the large family, to which [men] had come as not very confident strangers,’ but whose membership after a few months led them ‘to judge men either as desirable or undesirable additions to the family.’ After the war Blunden must have known, at least implicitly, that, as the years passed and as he attended the annual reunions of the Southdown Brigade, he increasingly romanticized the memory which his own writings did so much to keep alive. ‘When I think of them now,’ he wrote of the battalion in 1933, ‘bare winter is suddenly changed to spring;’12 and elsewhere at about the same time: ‘There had never been mutual understanding like it in your experience. Wherever you went, you saw a friend.’ Harrison, who lived on until 1964, was at the centre of these events and of Blunden’s recording of them. ‘We could almost eat him, but a divinity round our Colonel prevents the instinctive cannibalism from doing what it would.’13
The 11th was accepted for service on 1 July 1915 and went overseas as part of 116th Brigade in the 39th Division at the beginning of March 1916. Blunden himself divided the battalion’s front-line service into three phases, which in turn corresponded with the evolution of trench warfare on the western front. The first, which lasted until mid-August 1916, he portrayed in a remarkably idyllic light. Much of it was spent around the battlefields of 1915, close to the Belgian border, a sector bisected by the La Bassée canal, with Festubert and Givenchy to the north and the Cuinchy brickstacks to the south. A coal-mining area, tunnelling was conducted by both sides, but there were moments of fraternization, it was possible to swim in the canal, and trench warfare had not reached the sophistication or intensity that it was to acquire later in the war. As Blunden put it, the battalion was ‘seldom at any distance from the trenches – but the trenches were in the main “truly rural”’. Although there were horrible moments, one was soon out of the line, immersed in ordinary life and conscious of ‘something of beauty and health in the general impression’.14
The first indication that a step-change was imminent came on 29–30 June 1916. The battalion attacked a salient known as ‘the Boar’s Head’ between Neuve Chapelle and Richebourg, and suffered 120 casualties. Blunden’s ironical account of an operation of which he disapproved played down its strategic function, the need to commit German troops which might otherwise be sent south to the Somme, the great Anglo-French offensive whose artillery preparation had begun on 24 June and where the infantry attacked on 1 July. On 11 August the 11th itself went south: it encountered ‘a mood of War which permitted no half-measures and no estaminets in the communication trenches’. Heavy rain in late August disrupted plans for an attack at Hamel in the valley of the river Ancre, but on 2 September 1916 the battalion assembled in the forward trenches and at 5.10 am on the following morning went over the top. Some advance units got beyond the German front-line trench, but they found themselves isolated by the failure of the second and third waves, which had been hit by gunfire ‘heavier than we had known’. It seems to have been for his work in this action, when in charge of a carrying party taking bombs forward from dumps prepared before the battle, that Blunden was awarded the Military Cross. (The confusion arises from the fact that Blunden first heard of the award just after an action on 13 November 1916, when he had got himself lost and had as a result conducted an unintended reconnaissance of enemy territory.) According to Blunden the battalion lost 300 men on 3 September, and that day’s entry in its war diary recorded 160 wounded and 123 missing among the other ranks alone. Temporarily reduced from four companies to two, it received drafts totalling 591 men by 11 September. On 21–22 October, the battalion attacked and captured Stuff Trench, running north-east from the Schwaben redoubt, but at a loss of 279 casualties. Many of the men Blunden had come to love had gone, and most of those who filled the gaps did not come from Sussex. After the war Blunden was to ask himself whether the battalion could be said to have had a continuous existence when so few lived ‘through the full career of the unit’. He believed it did, but acknowledged that a time came when ‘my battalion was a thing of the past’.15
By the end of the year the battalion’s losses had reached about three-quarters of its original strength. However, the change which Blunden associated with the battle of the Somme arose less from what death had done to the composition of the battalion and more from the battle’s implications for the conduct of war. The battalion had been involved in nearly continuous fighting for three months, not coming out of the line until mid-November 1916. It ‘had been cut off, with little exception, from common sights and scenes of life, and had become accustomed to two views of the universe: the glue-ridden formless mortifying wilderness of the crater zone above, and below, fusty, clay-smeared, candle-lit wooden galleries, where the dead lay decomposing under knocked-in entrances’.16 It was the gap between war and ordinary life which would preoccupy him in writing Undertones of War.
If 1916 was shaped by the Somme, 1917 was dominated by Ypres, the third phase in the life of the battalion. Blunden went through both the battles that did most to define the British army’s experience of the First World War and of its initiation in, and development of, industrialized warfare, acquiring a length of service at the front rare in itself and possibly unique among the British war poets. The battalion was not in the line as continuously as it had been in 1916, and ‘we were often enough … a considerable distance from it, and passed weeks in sleepy villages and safety’. But time out of the line was increasingly disrupted by the growing menace of air attack, and by the requirement that officers attend the specialist courses which proliferated in response to changing tactical demands. Blunden wrote wearily of ‘that usual restlessness of “rest” … parades, clearings, baths, exercises, and lastly reconnaissances’.17
Blunden spent much of the early part of 1917 in the town of Ypres itself, having been appointed on Harrison’s recommendation to the brigade’s intelligence staff. Although located in the ramparts by the Lille gate, he still had to go on tours to the front line, and so kept in contact with his friends in the battalion. The latter maintained a regular rotation in and out of the line while training and preparing for the major offensive which began on 31 July. By then Blunden was back with the battalion, in charge of its signallers, and so took part in 39th Division’s attack north-east of Ypres in the direction of St Julien. ‘The British barrage’, he wrote in his account of the 11th’s doings on the opening day of the battle, ‘was such as numbed our powers of realization; the reply to it was instant, but diffused. The battalion took its objectives, and got busy with a line of shell-holes, shaping out some kind of posts; but the rain set in, and what the careful fire of the German heavies did not do the rain did.’18
One battalion leap-frogged another until on 2 August the 11th found itself on the line of the river Steenbeek. The water-table around Ypres made trench construction difficult, and the Germans had erected concrete pillboxes as strong points above the surface of the ground. The battalion headquarters occupied one of these, but its entrance – obviously enough – was open on the German side, and it received a direct hit from a German shell. Amazingly all those within, though stunned and shocked, survived, but by the time the 11th was relieved on 3 August it had suffered 275 casualties. Blunden confesses that he was profoundly shaken; two of his ‘Old Blue’ friends had been killed and his departure on leave deepened his despair. Fed by doubts about the value of the offensive as much as by self-doubt, he found those at home sustained by an illusion of success which he could not share. When he rejoined the battalion, the 39th Division had been switched to the other side of the Ypres salient, south of the Menin road. So devastated was the landscape, with shell holes rather than formed trenches providing protection for the men, it was hard to know where the front line ran or where the Germans were. Between 23 and 27 September the 11th suffered 200 casualties and the battalion headquarters was again hit, as it was during a further tour in mid-October. By then Blunden, now a company commander although only still a lieutenant and not yet twenty-one, found the front calmer than he expected; the pattern of artillery fire, the dominant killer of the First World War, had changed. Its increasing accuracy and the growing sophistication in its use meant that ‘the guns were fighting the guns rather than us’.19
By the time the 11th Royal Sussex was next caught up in a major offensive, it was back in the Somme sector and Blunden was no longer with it. On 21 February 1918 he went home to Britain for six months rest. Based at an army training camp in Suffolk, he married the daughter of a village blacksmith, Mary Daines, but struggled with feelings of guilt as he read of events in France in which he was not taking part. The 11th had been involved in the construction of deep positions in anticipation of the German attack which was launched on 21 March 1918. Brought up from reserve to help stem the German advance, it made a stand on 29–30 March along the road between Villers-Bretonneux and Aubercourt. The battalion lost 20 officers and 300 other ranks, and to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. It completed its last tour in the trenches on 3 May, and it was then split up – part being used to help train the arriving infantry of the United States army, and part going to northern Russia with the British intervention force. Blunden himself returned to France after the armistice in November and was demobilized in 1919.
‘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’, Blunden remarked in 1973, a year before his death.20 Unlike Graves, he could not say ‘goodbye to all that’. But the role he gave himself instead, to continue to bear testimony to what had happened and to honour the memory of his comrades, meant that he could not also maintain the stance that he had adopted in the original preface to Undertones of War. He acknowledged in the foreword to the second edition that his book had been read and appreciated by a wider audience, even if those readers had not gone the ‘same journey’. By 1935 he had collected pictures of the personalities and places mentioned in the text for what seems to have been intended as an illustrated edition: a striking evolution for an author who had hitherto relied on the power of the word to evoke an image. In 1936 he succeeded Rudyard Kipling (whose writing on the war he abominated) as the literary adviser to the Imperial, now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission. The cemeteries were both the means to remember those who had died and a warning intended to prevent another such war. He wrote forewords to the memories of others and promoted the poetry of Ivor Gurney, increasingly recognizing the need to bridge the divide between the inward journey of the veteran and the public comprehension of the war. His introduction to Great Short Stories of the War: England, France, Germany and America, published in 1930, although concluding that the fictional stories did not ‘equal the actual, fiercely honest, and endlessly significant tale that some of the men who survived will give you,’ acknowledged that ‘the ancient theory that matter of fact and imagination are the best of friends is distinctly alive.’
The most obvious manifestation of this impulse was his contribution to the new edition of Wilfred Owen’s collected poems which appeared in 1931. Owen’s poetry was first published in 1920 and reprinted in 1921. Sales were slight. Siegfried Sassoon, who had influenced Owen to decisive effect when both had been patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, felt too close to Owen to prepare a fuller edition, with the introductory and biographical matter which such a book required. He persuaded Blunden, who had never met Owen, to undertake the task. Blunden valued Owen as a witness: his poems were evidence of the experience of war, and could be read and appreciated by those who had not gone ‘the same journey’. They were also a protest. Blunden respected Owen’s position and promoted it, but it was not his way. The anti-heroes of Undertones of War are faceless and anonymous bureaucrats who generate paperwork, and demand returns and reports, despite the pressures of battle. The only general identified as such is M. L. Hornby, who commanded the 116th Brigade in which Blunden’s battalion served throughout his time at the front; as Blunden put it in 1933, Hornby ‘was ever with us though not one of us’. Blunden’s general was neither blimpish nor château-bound, just as his text is no more shaped by atrocity than it is by a questioning of the war’s purpose. But by stressing normality rather than revulsion, and by showing how familiar names acquire different and potentially fraught meanings in the context of war, Blunden’s poetry, as Desmond Graham has argued, uses irony for effects that are subversive. Blunden may require more effort from his readers than Owen, but he is at least as true to the memory of those with whom he served.
The mixture of subversion and respect which marked Blunden’s military career stamped the rest of his life too. The success of Undertones of War was followed in 1931 by a Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, which he resigned in 1943, and between 1966 and 1968 he held the Oxford professorship of poetry. He added a CBE to his MC, as well as a clutch of honorary degrees. But his fi rst two marriages failed and not until 1945 did he find happiness with Claire Poynting, by whom he had four daughters. For an English pastoralist, he proved remarkably ready to leave the countryside he celebrated, serving with the British liaison mission in Tokyo between 1948 and 1950, and going on to hold the chair of English in the University of Hong Kong between 1953 and 1964. When he retired, he did not return to Kent or Sussex, but set up home in Suffolk, the county where he had met Mary Daines in 1918. A life-long sufferer from asthma (a significant factor in the gas warfare of 1916–18), his body began to show the effects of the steroids on which he depended. He died on 20 January 1974 and was buried in Long Melford churchyard. His runner at Ypres, A. E. Beeney, placed a wreath of poppies on his coffin.
Hew Strachan