Undertones of War

Edmund Blunden

Jul 2015 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

This military memoir from the six-time Nobel Prize nominated poet and British WWI soldier is “one of the permanent works engendered by the memories of war” (Paul Fussell, National Book Award-winning author of The Great War and Modern Memory).
 
“I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!”

In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”

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.

Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on the bookshelves of military buffs and poetry lovers.

Ratings and reviews

Not my type of read. Not a fan of rhetorical questions. Long run on sentences with 3 or more commas which scatter different thoughts and descriptions of events or memories. Heavy descriptions on the mundane and by comparison, vague accounts of patrols.

About the author

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) was already a published poet when he was commissioned as an officer of the British Army during World War I. The author of several volumes of poetry and literary criticism, he went on to hold academic posts at Tokyo University and the University of Oxford after his military service.