'In Those Old Marshes Yet the Rifles Lie'

“But before he could install himself in his Oxford college, Britain declared war on the Central Powers, and soon this quiet young poet and literary scholar found himself commissioned in the Royal Sussex Regiment, where his shyness won him the nickname Bunny but his bravery won him the Military Cross.” 

An inattentive reader might assume that generic creature, the “Great War Poet,” was being described, whether Owen, Graves, Brooke, Sassoon, Rosenberg or Thomas, or some homogenized melding of them all. The story in its general outline is that familiar. In fact, Paul Fussell is profiling a lesser-known poet and veteran of that war, Edmund Blunden. “Miraculously he survived two years at the front,” Fussell reminds us, “perhaps because he was sent home a gas casualty before he could be killed.”

 

World War I has come to seem like the hinge on which Western Civilization turned toward its own protracted demise. Out of it grew the Russian Revolution, Stalin, Hitler, World War II, the Holocaust, Mao, the Cold War . . .  It’s the war we’re still fighting.

 

By all accounts, Blunden was a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children, John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He 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. Take these lines from his poem “1916 Seen From 1921”:

 

“I sit in solitude and only hear

Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,

The lost intensities of hope and fear;

In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,

The very books I read are there—and I

Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

 

“Its wounded length from those sad streets of war

Into green places here, that were my own;

But now what once was mine is mine no more . . .”

 

Blunden’s prose memoir of his two years’ service on the Western Front, Undertones of War (1928), is the best we have, far superior to Graves’ better-known Good-Bye to All That (1929):

 

“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.”

 

Fussell’s essay, “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden,” was published in the Fall 1986 issue of the Sewanee Review. His essential volume is The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Blunden was born on this date, November 1, in 1896, and died in 1974 at age seventy-seven.

 

About five years ago, R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, wrote a poem titled “Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)”:

 

“A shepherd in a greatcoat (the MC

Appended, unacknowledged) you patrolled

Old battlefields, the trenches, no man’s land,

The rear, the transports, nature all despoiled,

The shattered houses, farms, and roadside shrines,

But most of all you celebrated: troops,

The comrades you remembered all your life.

You would not, could not, let the horror go,

Nor undermine affection for your friends.

I honor you for that. I understand.”

 

“MC” is the Military Cross.