'War Is an Ancient Imposter'

“It was a sunny morning, that of July 1, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil.” 

Without his experience during the Great War, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) might have become a nature poet. He loved John Clare’s poetry (he named two of his children John and Clare) and Gilbert White. He was a nineteenth-century man in many ways, born to write pastorals. Instead, as his friend Siegfried Sassoon said, Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The passage above begins his essay “The Somme Still Flows,” written in 1929 and collected in The Mind’s Eye (Jonathan Cape, 1934). He continues:

 

“But, as the world soon knew, the music of the sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at that incessant drumming and the rattling of the windows. That night an even greater anxiety than usual forbade wives and mothers to sleep. The Battle of the Somme had begun.”

 

Just as many say the true Sixties started November 22, 1963, with the murder of President Kennedy, so my private calendar suggests the abattoir that would become the twentieth century started on July 1, 1916. The 141-day Battle of the Somme would result in more than one million casualties (killed, wounded, missing).

 

In 1915, a year after the start of the war, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army’s Roy Sussex Regiment. Soon after he was sent to France and posted to its 11^th Battalion, part of the 116^th Brigade of the 39^th Division. Once he was gassed but otherwise never wounded during his almost two years on the Western Front.

 

“Villages, wiped out in a few hours, earned reputations for hopeless horror when our men rose in the daylight from their already destroyed positions and moved to capture them. Some of them they did capture. Few who survived long enough under German guns and machine-guns to enter the trenches opposite could have retained any illusions.”

 

Blunden is seldom graphic in his descriptions of men wounded or killed. He refers to the battle as “a slow slaughtering process.” Blunden closes his essay like this:

 

“War had been ‘found out’, overwhelmingly found out. War is an ancient imposter, but none of his masks and smiles and gallant trumpets can any longer delude us; he leads the way through the cornfields to the cemetery of all that is best. The best is, indeed, his special prey. What men did in the Battle of the Somme, day after day, and month after month, will never be excelled in honour, unselfishness, and love; except by those who come after and resolve that their experience shall never again fall to the lot of human beings.”