All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross. I found myself pillaging my mothers collection of books after she had fallen out of favour with them. Following the war he served as Professor of English at the University of Tokyo from 1924-1927. He returned to England as magazine editor, and in 1931 he became a tutor at Oxford University where his writing career flourished. Post Second World War he became Professor of English Literature in Hong Kong. Blunden describes nature poetically at every opportunity he gets. This book has been described as an extended pastoral elegy in prose, and that is what it is.

Author, critic, and poet (the latter which for which he is most well known) Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London, and educated at The Queen's College at Oxford. In 1915 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment which he served with through the end of the war. He saw heavy action on the Western Front at both Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. Miraculously he was never severely injured. 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. 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.On the blue and lulling mist of evening, proper to the nightingale, the sheepbell and falling waters, the strangest phenomena of fire inflicted themselves. The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds." 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.” I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!” Already a keen poet when he signed up, Blunden adopts a prose style that is inches away from verse; too often, though, its mannered archaisms get in the way of felt authenticity, at least for a modern reader – at least for me, anyway. Recalling an old farmhouse he stayed in behind the line, for instance, Blunden is moved to this kind of thing: 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. 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. 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’…There are, of course, descriptions of war, and shells exploding, and people getting killed, but those descriptions are not graphic or gruesome but brief, unlike war memoirs which might be written today. 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; Undertones of War is a 1928 memoir of the First World War, written by English poet Edmund Blunden. As with two other famous war memoirs-— Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That-- Undertones represents Blunden's first prose publication, [1] and was one of the earliest contributors to the flurry of Great War books to come out of England in the late 1920s and early 1930s. [2] Synopsis [ edit ] Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence –

Blunden wasn’t at the front line all the time, he was an officer of works, transport and intelligence, so the book gives quite a broad picture of the war. He was at the front line for the Somme, Passchendaele and the third battle of Ypres. He was awarded a Military Cross. To cheat death while all around men are dying is not lost on Mr BLunden, to live to tell of the destruction of men is not taken lightly. I heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the language of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus." 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. He fought on two of the war’s great killing grounds, the Somme and Passchendaele. His battalion arrived on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield in September 1916, missing the great slaughters of the summer, but in time for two bloody months in the mud-sodden vicinity of Thiepval Wood, an area of vicious fighting and heavy casualties.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. An astonishing book. There is a move to restore the prestige of British High Command and the senior military figures of the 1914-18 war. The arguments blame the re-writing of the history of the trenches by later historians like Alan Clark and the theatrical types like Joan Littlewood. If this argument has any weight then the history of the war told before the 1950s should be one of great decisions and bold leadership. I've read a number of first hand accounts of what the war was like and I cannot find anything to undermine the "lions led by donkeys" point of view. Blunden is as loyal as an officer can be; both to the men he feels responsible for and the senior officers he feels responsible to. Yet even here there is a strong sense (openly expressed at times) of despair and frustration at decisions that are doomed to failure at the inevitable cost of thousands of lives. On the book itself, 'Undertones of War' is regarded as one of the great memoirs of the First World War. It has been compared to Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That'. Blunden is frequently mentioned together with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon as the three poets who fought in the First World War and survived to tell the tale.