Edmund Blunden went to school at Christ’s Hospital near Horsham in West Sussex and gained the senior classics scholarship at Queen’s College, Oxford. He volunteered with the Royal Sussex Regiment after leaving school and crossed over to France in 1916. His initial reaction to going is recorded in the opening words of his autobiography, Undertones of War
I was not anxious to go. An uncertain but unceasing disquiet had been upon me, and when, returning to the officers’ mess at Shoreham Camp one Sunday evening, I read the notice that I was under orders for France, I did not hide my feelings.
At the end of the war, travelling by train across a landscape turning green with new growth, he wrote
The mercy of nature advances.
Blunden was the longest serving First World War poet and saw continuous action in the front line between 1916 and 1918. His life-long friend Siegfried Sassoon maintained that Blunden was the poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it.