'As Though Nothing But Joy Came After!'

At the back of the first American edition of his Great War memoir Undertones of War (1929), Edmund Blunden appends a selection of thirty-one poems he titles, with perhaps mock-formality, “A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations.” Often the poems describe not combat but intervals between engagements and knowledge that the respite will be brief. As always, Blunden observes the pastures, livestock and orchards of the French countryside, and the ravages they have sustained in the fighting. Here is “At Senlis Once”: 

“O how comely it was and how reviving,

When with clay and with death no longer striving

Down firm roads we came to houses

With women chattering and green grass thriving.

 

“Now though rains in a cataract descended,

We could glow, with our tribulation ended--

Count not days, the present only

Was thought of, how could it ever be expended?

 

“Clad so cleanly, this remnant of poor wretches

Picked up life like the hens in orchard ditches,

Gazed on the mill-sails, heard the church-bell,

Found an honest glass all manner of riches.

 

“How they crowded the barn with lusty laughter,

Hailed the pierrots and shook each shadowy rafter,

Even could ridicule their own sufferings,

Sang as though nothing but joy came after!”

 

Senlis is a village about thirty miles northeast of Paris. It had been captured by the Germans in September 1914, and marked the limit of their advance on the French capital. In the prose portion of Undertones of War, Blunden writes of his unit’s approach to the village in 1916:

 

“[M]y own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we went along the road in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line.”

 

Blunden follows this with a brief reprieve from war: church bells, beer and chocolate, and soldiers admiring “with determination” the French girls who sold it to them. The “prime gift of eccentric heaven” was an invitation to a divisional concert party. Without transition, Blunden continues:

 

“Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, and with little to recommend our future to us.”

 

A frequent complaint from the men: where are we going? Blunden and the others follow orders with little knowledge of their destination or purpose.

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., the 108^th anniversary of the Armistice. An estimated 9.7 million military personnel died in four years of fighting. Starting in the early 1980s and for the next thirty years or so, R.L. Barth would write at least one epigram each Veterans Day. They now number more than one hundred. In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Here is one of his epigrams, untitled:

 

“'Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be?

Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”

 

And this is “Epitaph”:

 

“Tell them quite simply that we died

Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified."

 

Bob wrote to me this week: “My favorite WWI poet is and always has been Sassoon. However, the WWI poet I feel closest to is Blunden. Why? Take whichever of these reasons you prefer: he is the one poet who could never let go of the war, or he is the one poet the war would never let go.” Bob honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”:

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week’s rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

According to the U.S. Marine Corps History Division: “The Vietnam War was costly to the U.S. Marine Corps. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. Of these, more than 13,000 were killed and 88,000 wounded, nearly a third of all American causalities sustained during the war.”