'The Last Few Months Have Been a New World'

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) in his memoir of two years’ service on the Western Front, Undertones of War (1928): 

“Do I loiter too long among little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased for me to be big or little . . . Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm.  He spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents, which characterized the time. The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence.”

 

In passing, a sentry is vaporized by a German artillery shell. Blunden likens him to a birdboy, defined by the OED as “a boy employed to prevent birds from eating a crop or sown seeds, typically by scaring them away.” A human scarecrow. It’s typical of Blunden not to render the horror of the scene in explicit detail and to use a pastoral or rural image. In another passage he writes: “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.”

 

The observation about “incoherence” doesn’t lead Blunden to indulge in the imitative fallacy – writing chaotically because one’s subject is chaotic. Blunden continues in the same paragraph:

 

“I have not noticed any compelling similarity between a bomb used as an inkpot and a bomb in the hand of a corpse, or even between the look of a footballer after a goal all the way and that of a sergeant inspecting whale-oiled feet. There was a difference prevailing in all things. Let the smoke of the German breakfast fires, yes, and the savour of their coffee, rise in these pages, and be kindly mused upon in our neighbouring saps [covered trenches] of retrogression. Let my own curiosity have its little day, among the men of action and war-imagination.”

 

If you wish to read a single work devoted to the Great War written by a participant, I suggest Undertones of War. Blunden is best remembered as a poet, biographer, editor and literary scholar but his memoir is a masterwork of English prose and the finest first-person account we have of life in the trenches. How does a civilized, bookish man preserve his sanity and morality in a hell of poison gas, machine guns and artillery bombardments that last for days?

 

In the French village of Hamel, the church, “though stripped and tottering still had that spirit clinging to it which would have been the richest poetry to George Herbert.” During a renewed German shelling, Blunden’s sergeant points out the church: “‘It’s that bloody old church spire,’ he said, ‘that’s the cause of all this big stuff: enfilades the lot: why don’t the ’eavies get on to it?’ That spire, so cool, so calm, so bright, looked as though it deserved to escape, but it would hardly do so: even as we gazed, volumes of smoke began to burst out in the air around it.” Blunden is recalling the opening lines of George Herbert’s “Virtue”:

 

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridall of the earth and skie:

The dew shall weep thy fall to night;

                                    For thou must die.”

 

In A Man Could Stand Up (1926), the third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s Great War tetralogy, Parade’s End,  his hero Christopher Tietjens recalls the same lines from Herbert:

 

“What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the Silurist? . . . Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!”

 

Blunden is not a military historian. He never ponders strategy or the politics of war. He focuses on the mundane, the human, the ordinary that coexists with extraordinary circumstances. In his billet at night near the front, knowing he and his men must march south again the following day, he reflects on what he has seen, in a grand catalogue of seemingly random observations:

 

“The last few months have been a new world, of which the succession of sensations erratically occupies my mind; the bowed heads of working parties and reliefs moving up by ‘trenches’ made of sacking and brushwood; the bullets leaping angrily from old rafters shining in greenish flare-light; an old pump and a tiled floor in the moon; bedsteads and broken mattresses hanging over cracked and scarred walls; Germans seen as momentary shadows among wire hedges; tallowy, blood-dashed faces—but put back the blanket; a garden gate, opening into a battlefield; boys, treating the terror and torment with the philosophy of men; cheeky newspaper-sellers passing the gunpits; stretcher-bearers on the same road an hour after; the old labourer at his cottage door, pointing out with awe and importance to me the eaves chipped by anti-aircraft shrapnel (the guns meanwhile thundering away on the next parish); the cook’s mate digging for nose-caps where a dozen shells have just exploded; the postcards stuck on the corner of Coldstream Lane; the age that has gone by since I read [Edward] Young’s Night Thoughts in the dugout at Cuinchy. And, bless me, I forgot to rescue the book when it slipped down behind the bunks! We may go back again, of course; but—

 

“‘Time glides away, Lorenzo, like a brook,

In the same brook none ever bathed him twice.’”

 

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918 -- Armistice Day, now known in the U.S. as Veterans Day. Blunden died at his home in England on January 20, 1974, age seventy-seven. He was buried at Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford. Private A. E. Beeney of the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment, who had been Blunden's runner at Ypres and Passchendaele, attended the funeral and placed a wreath of Flanders poppies on his grave.