Very colourfully written, the description throughout is very evocative of trench warfare. Although Bluden avoids describing in bitter detail the gruesomeness, his wider description of the terrain and the effects of shelling on those in the trenches show how horrific it must have been.

It is humble throughout, Blunden avoids mentioning his Military Cross award or heaping any glory on himself; he seems much more interested in how the landscape suffers from the war which he blames much more on the top brass than he does the German. Blunden describes nature poetically at every opportunity he gets. This book has been described as an extended pastoral elegy in prose, and that is what it is. The shift from the celebration of the hero to the commemoration of the common soldier is one of the significant changes brought about by the Great War: this war is to be remembered in a fundamentally different way to previous wars. In late 1916 his brigade moved north into the Ypres Salient. Blunden’s description of life in the Salient is vivid and memorable. The Germans surrounded the city of Ypres on three sides, north, south, and east. Furthermore, they held the high ground so they had direct observation into every part of the city. They had registered mortars and artillery on every point where British troops might assemble, and kept up a continuous bombardment. The British lived in cellars and dugouts with the knowledge that a hit by a heavy shell would collapse the roof and bury them. For months Blundens’ brigade would alternate weeks in the trenches, in the snow, freezing mud, and bitter cold, with a troglodyte life underground in Ypres, and occasional spells farther behind the line to train and refit. Like many of his generation, World War I was a pivotal event in Blunden’s life. The year before his death he wrote, “My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.”“He was affected not only by the loss of human life, including several of his friends,” observes biographer Bernard Bergonzi, “but by the brutal destruction of a countryside that, in its natural state, was very like the rural England that he loved.” His acclaimed memoir, Undertones of War, is a series of vignettes or episodes that focus on seemingly unimportant things occurring in the day-to-day life of a platoon. Critic Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory(1975) calls Undertones of War“an extended pastoral elegy in prose. ... Its distinction derives in large part from the delicacy with which it deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony.” Fussell also pronounced Blunden’s Undertones of War, together with Siegfried Sassoon’s and Robert Graves’s memoirs, “one of the permanent works engendered by memories of the war.”

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On the book itself, 'Undertones of War' is regarded as one of the great memoirs of the First World War. It has been compared to Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That'. Blunden is frequently mentioned together with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon as the three poets who fought in the First World War and survived to tell the tale. Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence – All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.

Undertones of War is a 1928 memoir of the First World War, written by English poet Edmund Blunden. As with two other famous war memoirs-— Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That-- Undertones represents Blunden's first prose publication, [1] and was one of the earliest contributors to the flurry of Great War books to come out of England in the late 1920s and early 1930s. [2] Synopsis [ edit ] Hibbard, Dominic. The First World War. London: Macmillan, 1990. This work offers a chronological study of the war seen through the eyes of the writers who represented it at the time and much later. Generally, Hibbard does not focus much attention on Blunden, although he does point out that writers were far from univocal in their treatment of the war; responses ranged from the kind produced by Blunden to the gossipy cynicism and outrage of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. A slippery, allusive memoir of the Western Front which resists easy appreciation nowadays – many of its cool ironies and oblique descriptions are, one suspects, aimed more at contemporaries who knew what he was talking about than at future generations struggling to work it out. So, although Blunden was involved in two of the most horrific and iconic encounters of the British war, the Somme and Passchendaele, the overriding impression from this book is of a pastoralist taking note of the changing seasons, the ruined details of village life, songbirds heard at stand-to, fish shoaling in the rivers, light banter between soldiers. On the evidence of this book alone, you'd be forgiven at times for thinking that Third Ypres was an altercation of angry farmers; and when, laconically describing a direct hit on his dugout, Blunden passes over the wounded to note especially the presence of three confused fieldmice at the entranceway, you feel you are getting the essence of the writer.

Blunden returned to England in 1927. where he returned to military service as a staff member of the Oxford Training Corps and enjoyed his most productive period as an essayist and prose writer, publishing On the Poems of Henry Vaughn(1927), Leigh Hunt’s “Examiner” Examined (1928), and Nature in English Literature(1929), a volume in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Lectures on English Literature series. Nature in English Literature is much more than literary criticism; it is Blunden’s lay sermon on nature, his affirmation of faith in the spirit of the English countryside, and his argument for the inseparability of English literature from the Englishman’s love of nature. To Blunden, remarks Fussell, “the countryside is magical. It is as precious as English literature, with which indeed it is almost identical. ... To Blunden, both the countryside and English literature are ‘alive,’ and both have ‘feelings.’” In 1918 Blunden wrote a prose account of his experiences, 'De Bello Germanico: a fragment of trench history'. However he was not satisfied with it and only published it privately in 1930. Truly there are some beautiful passages, and I have full respect for Blunden and all that he witnessed in those horrifying years; not yet twenty when he first enlists. Some of his memories were moving... and horrific. This book deserves its reputation as one of the great war memoirs of all time. Blunden lets a scene speak for itself, understanding that sometimes fewer words mean greater impact. Following are some quotes that demonstrate his ability to describe a situation, and let the reader fill in for himself the psychological and emotional impact. As time passes, Blunden increasingly sought the friendship of kindred spirits who, through art, could transcend the horror of war. In Chapter Twenty-five, for example, he describes Worley, a sketcher. It is with clear affection that Blunden writes, "He showed these drawings to very few persons, to me most, for he believed I knew about such matters. I loved him for this new expression of a simple but profound trust." The famous final sentence of Undertones of War reads:

Cross, Tim, ed. Lost Voices of World War I. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. A moving anthology of poetry and other short works by writers who were killed in the conflict. It includes a fine introduction by Robert Wohl, a leading scholar of modernism, who offers valuable insight into how Blunden’s British contemporaries felt about literature and the role it plays in society. In October 1919 Blunden took up his deferred place at Oxford. Although he made friends among the aspiring writers in the university, many of them ex-servicemen like himself, he found it hard to settle and to support his family. In 1920 he left Oxford to take up a part-time editorial post at the journal 'The Athenaeum', (later incorporated into 'The Nation' then into the 'New Statesman'). Blunden published collections of his poems: The Waggoner (1920); and The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War (April 1922) which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. He was recognized as a young writer of great promise. This ‘not inanimate’ business is a nod to John Clare's ‘The Fallen Elm’, and the whole text is shot through with similar echoes, a few identified, but most, as here, not (though at least here the inverted commas are a clue to flex your memory and/or your Google-fu). At times the references are so strong that he simply delegates to other artists, noting of the trees in No-Man's-Land that their description can be found in Dante, and saying of the trenches at Ypres only that ‘John Nash has drawn this bad dream with exactitude’.Blunden wasn’t at the front line all the time, he was an officer of works, transport and intelligence, so the book gives quite a broad picture of the war. He was at the front line for the Somme, Passchendaele and the third battle of Ypres. He was awarded a Military Cross. The Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and earth, and life were much the same thing – and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison…. Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. Here we were to ‘hold the line,’ for an uncertain sentence of days.” (p. 98) Jerry Palmer is the former Professor of Communications at London Metropolitan University and Visiting Professor of Sociology at City University. He has also held visiting posts at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, and at Copenhagen and Aarhus Universities. Most of his publications are about popular culture and the mass media, ranging from a book about crime fiction and two about humour and comedy, to Spinning into Control, an analysis of source-journalist relations and Media at War, a book about the press coverage of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The village was friendly, and near it lay the marshy land full of tall and whispering reeds, over which evening looked her last with an unusual sad beauty, well suiting one's mood."