Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, edited by John Greening, (O.U.P. 2015 978-0-19-871661-7 £30)
If Edmund Blunden’s autobiographical account of his service in World War I is one of the best pieces of prose to come out of that maelstrom, and I for one think that it is, then John Greening’s edition will stand as the authoritative one for many years to come. The editorial work in this new edition from Oxford University Press is outstanding and this is because Greening has a clear understanding of what needs to be included in terms of contextual notes and surrounding material without these ever interfering with the central thrust of Blunden’s narrative.
Part One of this edition contains the text itself followed by a supplement of ‘Poetical Interpretations and Variations’; Part Two, a supplementary text, contains a further supplement of poems and the thirteen page Diary Blunden kept in 1917 and this is then followed by 160 pages of clear and unfussy notes. The whole book, containing photographs and drawings presented within the text, is a delight to hold and compelling to read. It gives clear evidence to the statement made by the Post-Modernist poet, J. H. Prynne, when he addressed the Blunden Society in 2009:
What I believe distinguishes Blunden in his generation, maybe in any company, is the peculiar intelligence and quality of his autobiographical prose. He was not the only one to become a kind of memoirist, to attempt the composition of fierce and fearsome memories in prose: there are also, for instance, Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon’s account in Sherston’s Progress, both developed in the aftermath of the war itself and both (in this also like Blunden’s Undertones) a kind of therapeutic self-purging, attempting to re-set and re-locate the boundaries of personal memory. But Blunden’s contribution to this genre is quite distinctive and is, I believe, superior in quality to all the others.
According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary an ‘undertone’ not only refers to an ‘undercurrent’ of feeling but also to a subdued and underlying tone of colour and the appropriateness of this word to Blunden’s narrative is clear from the opening chapter, ‘The Path without Primroses’, with its sly glance at the words used by Ophelia to her brother in Hamlet. The chapter opens up with the direct statement ‘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.’ Having been in charge of a squad of men ‘nominally recovered from wounds and awaiting their next transmigration’ Blunden recognized that undertone of Fate in the orders and could see that these soldiers possessed a similar sense of recognition:
They hid what daily grew plain enough—the knowledge that the war had released them only for a few moments, that the war would reclaim them, that the war was a jealous war and a long-lasting.
Blunden’s language is that of a scholar, a reader of poetry, and the reference to Shakespeare is merely one of the many echoes of his reading that thread their way through his narrative. As he landed in France he recalls a ‘train journey between verdurous banks and silvering poplars’ which took him to ‘The Base’:
dismal tents, huge wooden warehouses, glum roadways, prisoning wire! I took my share of a tent, trying to remember the way to freedom, and laid on my valise the ebony walking-stick which had been my grandfather’s, and was to be my pilgrim’s staff. It went. I was away from it only a few minutes—it went.
It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest an echo here of Robert Browning’s Dramatic Romance “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” in which the poet turns from ‘that hoary cripple, with malicious eye’ to set foot on the road to confront his own destiny:
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O’er the safe road, ’t was gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I must go on; nought else remained to do.
As with the quest of Childe Roland, Blunden’s phantasmagoric journey south involves not only eerie meetings (‘One of these was a doubtful blessing; he was noted for hairy raggedness and the desire to borrow a little money; he now appeared stumping along as though with a millstone about his neck, and, questioned, did not comfort us’) but also a landscape that ‘shared the past with the defences of Troy’:
The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is little but remoteness about a skull. And, as for the future, one of the first hints that came home to me was implied in a machine-gun emplacement stubbornly built in brick and cement, as one might build a house.
As Browning’s hero is confronted by a little river which crosses his path the landscape has a vivid realism of nightmare:
So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
Similarly, in Blunden’s arrival at Cuinchy the landscape takes on hideous proportions:
Over Coldstream Lane, the chief communication trench, deep red poppies, blue and white cornflowers and darnel thronged the way to destruction; the yellow cabbage-flowers thickened here and there in sickening brilliance. Giant thistles made a thicket beyond. Then the ground became torn and vile, the poisonous breath of fresh explosions skulked all about, and the mud which choked the narrow passages stank as one pulled through it, and through the twisted, disused wires running mysteriously onward.
It is entirely typical of John Greening’s intelligent editing that he should direct us at this point to the Edmund Blunden Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library at New York’s Columbia University to note that in later editions these thistles became ‘teazels’ and that an earlier phrase the ‘strange spirit’ should be omitted, to be replaced by ‘sullen sorcery’.
Blunden’s language in his account of a disastrous attack on Boar’s Head reveals a shrewd awareness of how horror and the world of the old school-tie, games on the pitch, merge together in this unreal-real world:
Before long ‘secret’ attack orders came, which everyone had to know. The phrase was that ‘The following officers and men have been carefully selected to participate,’ or some such honorific proscription…
One has the eerie feeling of a dummy-scissors movement, or some such sporting trick, being prepared and hence the careful selection of players who are going to ‘participate’. The understated conclusion to the massacre that ensued is finely placed by Blunden as the attack on Boar’s Head closed, and ‘so closed the admirable youth or maturity of many a Sussex worthy.’
Greening’s note to the opening of the ‘Great Push’ of July 1916 is quiet and clear in its tone:
Haig’s so-called Great Push: on the first morning alone, 57,470 British soldiers fell, 20,000 of them never to rise. By the end of the ‘battle’, there were at least one and a quarter million British casualties.
However, yet again one of the fine qualities of Greening’s editing skills leads him to quote from Blunden’s 1929 essay, ‘The Somme Still Flows’:
It was a sunny morning, that of July 1st, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil. But, as the world soon knew, the music of that sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at the incessant drumming and the rattling of windows. That night an even greater anxiety than usual forbade wives and mothers to sleep. The Battle of the Somme had begun.
This review contributed by Ian Brinton