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  Undertones of War

  Edmund Blunden was born in 1896 and educated at Christ’s Hospital and Queen’s College, Oxford. He was brought up in the Kentish countryside and he served with the Royal Sussex Regiment in the First World War, at the same time publishing his early poems. Through much of the 1920s and again in the late 1940s he taught in Japan and from 1953 to 1964 was Professor of English Literature at Hong Kong University. His sympathy with the Far East comes out in a number of his later poems and prose essays. In 1967–8 he was Oxford Professor of Poetry. Undertones of War, prose memories combined with poems, is considered to be one of the classic books to emerge from the First World War, and he received many awards for his other work, among them the Hawthornden Prize and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. As a critic and essayist Blunden was largely concerned with the more elusive figures of the romantic period, such as Leigh Hunt, and with the delights of cricket and country life and landscape. Edmund Blunden died in 1974.

  Formerly a lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, Hew Strachan is now Chichele Professor of the History of War and a Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is the author of a number of books on the British Army and the First World War in particular, including European Armies and the Conduct of War (1983) and The Politics of the British Army (1997). The first volume of his three-volume history of the Great War was published by Oxford University Press in 2001 to critical acclaim, and his one-volume history, The First World War, was written in 2003 to accompany the Channel 4 television series of the same name.

  EDMUND BLUNDEN

  Undertones of War

  with an Introduction by Hew Strachan

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  First published 1928

  Published in Penguin Classics 2000

  This edition with a new Introduction published in Penguin Classics 2010

  Copyright © Edmund Blunden, 1928

  Introduction copyright © Hew Strachan, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96947-3

  Undertones of War: Introduction

  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 cr
eated 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 a
t 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