'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain'

In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden articulates the impulse that would drive his poetry for the next half-century: “I must go over it again.” Psychically, there was no Armistice. Whether to purge its memory or understand it, Blunden could never surrender the Great War as subject, not unlike millions of  combat veterans in other wars. To complacently call it PTSD, to express our non-combatant sympathy and gratitude – “Thank you for your service,” uttered as reflexively as Gesundheit! -- as though that settled anything, is futile and frequently patronizing. The memories are still returning to Blunden in the middle of “Ancre Sunshine,” written c. 1964: 

“Here half a century before might I,

Had something chanced, about this point have lain,

Looking with failing sense on such blue sky,

And then became a name with others slain.”

 

Undertones of War, Blunden’s Great War memoir, published a decade after the Armistice, is the finest we have, superior to Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy. Blunden saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The first chapter of the memoir, “The Path Without Primroses,” begins “I was not anxious to go.”

 

The Somme chapter is titled “The Storm.” The 141-day battle started on July 1, 1916. British forces that first day suffered more than 57,000 killed or wounded. The dead numbered 19,240. In four months of fighting, some 1.25 million men were killed or wounded at the Somme. Blunden 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 November 1968, little more than three years before his death, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”