Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137321 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Synopsis
In this World War One autobiography, the poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Enlisting at the age of 20 in 1916, he took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as "murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes". He tells of the many evidences of endurance, heroism, and despair found among the officers and men of his battalion. This volume, which also contains a selection of his war poems, reveals the close affinity which Blunden felt with the natural world. While he laments the loss of optimism, the betrayal of promise and the futility wrought by the war, Blunden finds hope in the natural landscape; it is the only thing which survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields. The author died in 1974.

Customer Reviews

A Poetic Account of War
It takes a bit of getting used to reading a book as old as this, you don't realise how much the use of language changes over time. Edmund Blunden was clearly a wonderful writer and experienced the full horrors of WW1. I found the book however ultimately unsatisfying. This is possibly because we live in an age where everything is very explicit whereas Blunden's writings are poetic and subtle. I'll probably read this book again in a few years and reappraise it.

Very hard work
It is not my place to comment on how well Blunden conveys the horrors of an experience he, himself endured, however the dense buccolic language of this book has the effect of estranging the reader. The text is extremely verbose and difficult to penetrate, at intervals the sense of atrocity and paradoxically, beauty is conveyed, yet the book remains extremely obtuse.
Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to all that' - is a much easier and more comprehensible lead into writing of WWI.

'It is time to hint to a new age what your value was'
While writing a first-hand war diary must be tantamount to aspiring to express the inexpressible, the decade Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War took in the making bought him time to distance himself from the numbing impact of the Great War events demanding to be exorcised.

The book offers an understated account of the events that gripped the minds of Blunden and his beloved 11th Royal Sussex Regt., taking the reader from the build-up to the Battle of the Somme and on to Third Ypres and Passchendaele, campaigns which left the party shattered morally and badly depleted for size. The overall experience at the time was beyond the comprehension of a single human being, the more so as Blunden (barely 20) was too young to deal with, let alone, put into prespective, the depths and cruelty of events as he witnessed them. The combined effect of a cathartic ten years' time and Blunden's mildness and humanity of temperament has only added to the merits of a book which, to this day, has been, and deserves to remain, a long-standing classic.

As perfection is not of this world, Blunden's inclination towards quoting from his literary predecessors might be considered a minor flaw. Likewise, the critical reader might feel mildly irritated at the pastoral tone and evocative detail with which the author intersperses his account. Anyone will, however, agree that in no way has Blunden sought to embellish his experiences, but perceive that, in the face of devastation, he merely set out to find comfort in the permanence of forms and shapes to go by, as well as to pinpoint solidarity and camaraderie as beacons along their dark ways. The latter can be derived from Blunden's dedication of the books to some of his pals, whether dead or alive at the time.

"It is time to hint to a new age what your value, what your love was; your Ypres is gone, and you are gone; we were lucky to see you 'in the pink' against white-ribbed and socket-eyed despair.": how appropriate a description of a near-perfect book, the universality of whose message remains unimpaired. As a tribute to the ordinary soldier in too great a war, Undertones of War is more eloquent than any Menin Gates or Passchendaele Tyne Cot Cemeteries could ever aspire to be.