'The War Had Won'

“The war had taken his innocence and replaced it with something else. That something – ‘the destined anguish’ - revealed itself gradually and became a presence in his poetry for the rest of his life.” 

Margi Blunden, speaking in 2014, is remembering her father, the poet and Great War veteran Edmund Blunden (1896-1974). The quoted phrase – “the destined anguish” – is taken from the final page of her father’s memoir, Undertones of War (1928), and refers to the loss of innocence that will “poison” the remainder of his postwar life. Margi refers to the “Feast of Five,” a photograph of her father and four of his childhood friends taken shortly before the Battle of Passchendaele. Two would be killed the following month and a third would take his own life in 1924. Blunden’s daughter writes:

 

“I think this photo expresses so much about the war and its truth. The war seeped in. It became an unwelcome companion. It disturbed. It attached itself. It turned and churned the inner world of those who landed in its clutches. It shaped a demon in the psyche which had to be met, fought with and tamed. The irony is that it couldn’t be tamed. How do you forget the eyeball under the duckboard, the boots with a pair of feet in them, the deaths of your friends, the wild destruction of the earth?”

 

At age nineteen, Blunden was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. He describes the Somme battlefield as “this satire in iron brown and field grey.” It is a “gluey morass . . . cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing . . . the deep dugouts . . . were cancerous with torn bodies.” Blunden refers to “the long finger of war,” suggesting the battle raged long after the Armistice. In a late poem, “Ancre Sunshine” (1966), he writes:

 

“The railway trains went by, and dreamily

I thought of them as planets in their course,

Thought bound perhaps for Arras, how would we

Have wondered once if through the furious force

Murdering our world one of these same had come,

Friendly and sensible – ‘the war’s over chum.'”

 

In his 1934 essay collection, The Mind’s Eye, Blunden writes of the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), which would rage for four and a half months:

 

“By the end of the day, both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The war had won, and would go on winning.”

On that first day, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 killed. The French Sixth Army had 1,590 casualties and the German 2nd Army between 10,000 and 12,000 losses.

The Armistice was signed on this date, November 11, in 1918. Five years later, on November 11, 1923, Adolf Hitler was arrested for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, leading eventually to the resumption of the world war in 1939.

 

[Margi Blunden spoke during the British First World War Poetry event held at the University of Oxford in April 2014. Her talk was published later that year in the journal Use of English.]