Like Robert Graves, about whom I wrote recently (July 23rd), Edmund Blunden was an English poet who fought in the first World War and somehow survived to write a classic memoir. Like Graves, too, he published his book a decade after 1918. But there, probably, the similarities end.
Graves's book was calculated to shock (his own father and Blunden were among the readers who disliked it), and had a simultaneously catchy yet portentous title, Goodbye to All That.
Blunden's, by contrast, was subtle to a fault. An admiring critic likened its depth of detail to a Rembrandt painting. But it was written in poetic, elliptical language, and even its title was muted, Undertones of War.
Not that the author was trying to mask harsh facts. On the contrary, in a preface to the first edition, he admitted that had been his downfall in an earlier attempt at the memoir, circa 1918, which was “noisy with a depressing forced gaiety then very much the rage”.
As he explained: "To call a fellow creature 'old bean' may be well and good; but to approach in the bearish style such mysteries as Mr Hardy foreshadowed in The Dynasts [Thomas Hardy's verse drama about the Napoleonic Wars] is to have misunderstood and to pull truth's nose."
Blunden’s finished work does not pull truth’s nose. But it always avoids stating the obvious, never mind overstating it. And despite this, the unrelenting mildness of his language only serves to highlight the horror all around him.
Among the lessons he learned early in the war was not to worry about those already dead, since the plight of the living was so precarious. This was not an easy lesson, because the trenches were a charnel-house.
Bones stuck out everywhere; “skulls appeared like mushrooms”. After a while, newly exhumed bodies were nothing to talk about unless someone found a watch or money on them: “Lucky devil!”
There were exceptions. Examining a pit once, Blunden came across “a pair of boots, still containing someone’s feet”. And then there was a Scottish soldier, found on a battlefield in a kneeling position that Blunden mistook as a sign of life: “Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.”
But in general, the author learned to affect the dispassion of an archaeologist in surveying remains. And having not arrived at the front until 1915, he learned to think of anything before that as distant history. Dating old shell-holes, or the skeleton of a German officer, he would attribute them to a battle from “ancient days – perhaps in 1914”.
Back among the living, meanwhile, he saw countless friends who were there one moment and gone the next. Among them were at least two Irishmen, including a Dr Gatchell, who defied German bombardment to fetch a bottle of whiskey from his post and returned, joking, before “a thump like a thunderbolt stopped him [and] he fell mute, white, face down, the bottle still in his hand”.
Another was “Doogan”, who survived two major front-line advances but, faced with another, correctly foresaw his demise. Blunden remembered him breaking off from a comic song about Charlie Chaplin to remark, without self-pity: “It’s the third time they’ve sent me over [...] They’ll get me this time.” Blunden could not a convincing counter: “Doogan seemed to know; and he was tired.”
Amid the many terrors, of course, there were long periods of boredom. (Helping to pass these were "magazines from home, among which was The Gypsy, a frolic in decadent irreverences published in Dublin").
And as Blunden admits, there were occasional raptures too, when a battle passed and you lived to see another morning.
Remembering one such moment, when he and his comrades were caught up in the romance of a regimental march, with spirits soaring to the accompaniment of a band, he abandons all restraint and surrenders himself to poetry:
“From the pit, arise and shine, let the drum and trumpet mark the pride of your measure; you have now learned that the light is sweet, that a day in peace is a jewel whose radiances vary and frolic innumerably as memory turns it in her hand [...] Here is this jewel; kind Nature will shield it from the corrosions of yesterday; yield yourself to this magical hour; a starling curving among tens of thousands among the blue mere, a star spinning in the bright magnetic pilgrimage of old God; follow that God, and look you mock him not.”