1 Edmund Blunden, Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War (London, 1996), ed Martin Taylor, p. 10.
2 Cyril Falls, War Books: An annotated bibliography of books about the Great War (London, 1930), pp xvi, 182–3.
3 Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (New Haven, 1990), p.46.
4 Blunden, Overtones of War, p.7
5 Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: twelve soldier poets of the First World War (London, 2002), p. 118.
6 Blunden, Overtones of War, p. 18.
7 George Walter, In Flanders Fields: Poetry of the First World War (London, 2004), introduction; I am grateful to Margi Blunden, Edmund Blunden’s daughter, and to her husband Martin Chown both for this reference and for much other help.
8 Brigadier-General G. H. Harrison, Edmund Blunden: Sixty-Five (Hong Kong, November 1961), p. 106.
9 Keith Grieves, ‘“Lowther’s Lambs”: Rural paternalism and voluntary recruitment in the First World War’, Rural History, IV (1993), pp 55–75; here p. 62.
10 Webb, Blunden, p. 99.
11 Blunden to Takoshi Saito, quoted in Webb, Blunden, p. 170.
12 Edmund Blunden, ‘A battalion history’, first published in The Mind’s Eye (1934), and reprinted in Overtones of War, ed Taylor, pp 213–225; here p. 225.
13 Blunden, Fall in, Ghosts: An essay on a battalion reunion (London, 1932), pp 12, 13, 17.
14 Blunden, ‘A battalion history’, p. 216.
15 Fall in, Ghosts, 13–14, where he links it to the aftermath of the Ypres battle in 1917.
16 Blunden, ‘A battalion history’, p. 218.
17 ibid, pp 223–4.
18 ibid, p. 221.
19 ibid, p. 223.
20 Webb, Blunden, p. 98.