'This Is Not What We Were Formerly Told'

“I have been young, and now am not too old” 

Edmund Blunden was nineteen years old when he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in the spring of 1916. For the next two years he saw continuous action on the Western Front, survived the fighting at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele, and was de-mobbed in February 1919, age twenty-two. It’s impossible for most of us to understand the lasting impact two years of sustained combat, including being gassed, would have on a young man from Yalding.

 

The line quoted at the top opens Blunden’s poem “Report on Experience” (Near and Far, 1929). Painful experience, we know, can age us prematurely. We’ve all known people – veterans and crime victims, among others – who seem oddly mature, even wise, because of what they have endured in life.  They’re the ones who survived, who weren’t broken. Blunden’s first stanza makes no overt reference to war:

 

“I have been young, and now am not too old;

And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honour and his quality taken.

This is not what we were formerly told.”

 

That first line recalls the King speaking in Henry VI, Part 1, Act III, Scene 4: “When I was young, as yet I am not old.” Also, Psalm 37:25. Here is the remainder of the poem, with Blunden working hard to find some hope:

 

“I have seen a green country, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished -

God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

 

“I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,

Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

She turned to harlotry; - this I took to be new.

 

“Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

These disillusionments are His curious proving

That He loves humanity and will go on loving;

Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.”

 

The Allies suffered more than 22 million casualties, the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria), more than 15 million. The war ended on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, what we call Veterans Day in the U.S.