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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, Undertones of War, and his early edition of Wilfred Owen's poems were just two examples of the ways in which he sought to convey his war experience, and to keep faith with his comrades in arms. His poetry is suffused by this experience, and he was haunted by it throughout his writing life, as the men with whom he had served gradually joined the ranks of the departed. This selection of Blunden's prose about the First World War includes the complete text of De Bello Germanico, his first, lively sketch of the war as he lived it in 1916, alongside other essays and reflections. Deeply informed by his reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and equally by his knowledge of the countryside, Blunden's vivid prose summons up for us what was human and natural in that most unnatural of environments, the battlefields of the Western Front.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
Edmund Blunden
FALL IN, GHOSTS
Selected War Prose
Edited with an introduction byRobyn Marsack
CONTENTS
A page from Blunden’s manuscript of De Bello Germanico. Reproduced from facsimile, courtesy of the Estate of Edmund Blunden.
INTRODUCTION
Edmund Blunden’s battalion nickname, ‘Rabbit’, his characterisation of himself at the end of his bestselling memoir Undertones of War as ‘a harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat’, and the frequent descriptions by friends of his ‘birdlike’ aspect suggest a man ill-equipped to deal with the privations and horrors of front-line service in France 1916–18. Or indeed with the social demands on an officer at the Front, as he indicates with characteristic self-deprecation:
‘Have a drink?’ ‘No thanks, I don’t drink.’ ‘Have a cigarette?’ ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke.’ ‘Play bridge?’ ‘Sorry, I don’t play cards.’ ‘Well, what the hell do you do?’ No known heading apparently applied to me.
De Bello Germanico and the essays collected here show us a man who never lost sight of that teenager who set out for France, and whose imaginative life was shaped by his army years. It shaped his physical life, too, which mostly goes unmentioned: asthma exacerbated by gassing, breathlessness, war nightmares that disturbed his sleep throughout his life, and – not surprisingly – ready recourse to alcohol. A crude description of Blunden’s trajectory would be that he started out in Paradise, tumbled into Hell, and spent the remainder of his life between the two, but it would have to be complicated by the knowledge that the hellish years provided some of his proudest memories (‘I knew that I did better one or two nights on the River Ancre than I ever can with my ink bottle’1), his most enduring friendships; the essays are a testament to all that.
Edmund Blunden was born in London on 1 November 1896, to Charles and Georgina Blunden; they had met when he was head teacher of St John’s primary school, Fitzroy Square, and she was starting out as a teacher. With Edmund and his baby sister they moved to Yalding in Kent in 1898, and this village remained his ideal: ‘How I turned to you / Beyond estranging years that cloaked my view / with all their wintriness of fear and strain…’.2 His happy childhood there was succeeded by stimulating schooldays at Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, where he was eventually captain of the school and also captain of his house cricket team – the house being Coleridge A, one of the strong literary links that Blunden so treasured in the school. (S.T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were all pupils of Christ’s Hospital.) In 1914 he was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at The Queen’s College, Oxford, but he was bound for the army, joining up in August 1915.
His post-war life, in the period in which he was writing most of these essays, included his first marriage in 1918, his meeting Siegfried Sassoon in 1919 and the death of his first child, Joy, aged five weeks, the same year. He went up to Oxford in the autumn, changed his subject from Classics to English, moved to Boar’s Hill outside the town where John Masefield, Robert Graves and Robert Nichols were also living, but found he was more interested in editing the poems of John Clare (1793–1864) than in following his course. It was also very hard for returned servicemen – as other memoirs relate – to adapt to life at Oxford, and he had a wife and family: Clare, born in 1920 and then John, in 1922. So he left Oxford after a year, and became assistant to John Middleton Murry on the Athenaeum. Between 1920 and 1924 he contributed over 200 pieces to the Athenaeum and the Nation, and with his contributions to the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, produced over 400 items in those years, as well as publishing his collections The Waggoner (1920), The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922), and his edition (with Alan Porter) of Poems Chiefly from Manuscript by John Clare.
A voyage to South America on a cargo ship in 1922 was intended to improve his health – he produced a prose account, The Bonaventure – but the strain of earning his living, supporting his family and finding that his wife did not enjoy the literary life he relished in London, led him to accept Robert Nichols’s suggestion that he apply for the position of Professor of English in Tokyo, when Nichols retired in 1924. Mary and the children remained in England, and after a depressed start Blunden began to find Japan congenial, and worked on what was to become Undertones of War.
When he returned to England in 1928, he went back to literary journalism and again produced 400 contributions to journals over about three years, along with editions of various cherished poets’ works. Undertones of War was published in 1928, and his collection Near and Far, with the much-anthologised poem ‘Report on Experience’, came out when he was 33:
I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told. […]
His marriage ended formally in 1931; in the same year he published his edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen, which was to remain standard for many years, and became a Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College, Oxford.3 There he remained until 1942, and during those years met, married and divorced the writer Sylva Norman. In 1932 they visited the French battlefields around Cassel, Amiens and the Somme, and co-wrote a ‘novel’ of the trip which Blunden’s biographer describes as probably Blunden’s ‘least distinguished literary venture’,4We’ll Shift our Ground (1933). The Mind’s Eye, a collection of essays, was published in 1934, as was a collection of poems, Choice or Chance.
Blunden resigned from Merton in 1942 and returned to work on the TLS. In 1945 he married Claire Poynting, fifteen years his junior, with whom he had four daughters and much happiness. In a loving but also a warning letter, Blunden told her that the lists of those killed in World War II brought to mind his comrades through a coincidence of names:
I find the name of Guy Compton, who was in my company in 1916 and who was an extraordinarily brave youth; he left us and was killed in 1917. I can still see him and hear him returning from bombing a German trench and (to his own horror) killing a poor old spectacled fellow who was creeping round a corner with awful anxiety. So you see how the years pass, for I am really not much more fit for this world than I was when I gave Compton a drink and listened to his passionate and half-weeping story. That was at ‘Port Arthur’, which I haunt still (perhaps they don’t know what it is, at the estaminet there, that disturbs the silence).5
That same haunting is lightly sketched in ‘The Extra Turn’, where Blunden imagines a gramophone still playing ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ at Auchonvilliers, long after the British soldiers have departed. The turntable never ceases: the war itself keeps revolving in the listener’s mind. In The Mind’s Eye, Blunden writes as one to whom a calendar date means nothing: ‘the baffling of my sense of time present’ takes only a song.6
The last essay in this collection was published in 1968, in a volume to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, by which time Blunden was settled in his final home in Long Melford, Suffolk. He had been Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong 1953–64, and in 1966 had been elected as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, succeeding Robert Graves in a much-publicised vote (his closest rival was Robert Lowell). But in 1968 he resigned for health reasons, and this essay was one of his last to be published. Blunden also wrote a piece for the Daily Express for the armistice, in which he considered whether ‘the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power’, given that since 1918 ‘hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story’. He had once thought it might, about a year previously when he and other old soldiers and their friends had visited the battlefields. He had been pointing out aspects of the Ypres Salient, and
had the sensation that suddenly, after so long, the obstinate scenes were at last vanishing. It was as though I was looking at a countryside where there had never been any war. Even the enormous Messines mine crater, which is just one of the effects of Ypres, no longer demanded my notice. […] And yet, even as I think of that incredible war work, it stops any question of forgetting. I know, now that I am an old man, that I take with me something that will never yield to the restoratives of time.7
What did it mean, then, to survive? Undoubtedly Blunden suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder: guilt at surviving, and not being with his battalion on the Somme in 1918 (‘Why slept not I in Flanders clay / With all the murdered men?’)8; endless revisitation of the battlefields, in dreams and on paper; difficulties in close relationships – Blunden was benevolent towards but not deeply engaged with his young second family; an unyielding sense of responsibility to the dead. Whatever he could or might do – and as in his Hong Kong tenure, he tried to fend off the disorder by over-working – it never seemed to be enough.
Of the First World War poets best known to us a hundred years later, Blunden spent the longest period of continuous service in the Front Line: twenty-four months, without being wounded. Edward Thomas was in France for only four months before his death at Arras; Charles Sorley and Julian Grenfell both died in 1915 after less than a year of service; Robert Graves served for a year before injuries and ill-health kept him in England; Ivor Gurney was sent back to England, suffering from the effects of gas, in 1917 after about fourteen months in France; Siegfried Sassoon served sixteen months; Isaac Rosenberg nineteen months before his death in spring 1918. David Jones survived the opening of the Battle of the Somme, was wounded but back in action in October 1916, and after twenty-two months was sent home with trench fever. He died in 1974, the same year as Blunden.
Four of those five surviving poets wrote their memoirs of the war: Blunden’s Undertones of War came first, reprinted three times within a month of its publication on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war. Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) was followed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930); between them came Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which infuriated both Blunden and Sassoon. They spent an enraged evening annotating a copy ‘with over 300 corrections and hostile comments in the margin’, which they intended to deposit in the British Museum. Blunden’s relationship with Graves did not mend for nearly forty years. Writing to the Keats scholar Takeshi Saito in Japan, Blunden excoriated his former friend: ‘It is the season of gross and silly war books, and he has succeeded in selling his. […] the distortion of men like Graves has been so widely commended; it is like using the cemeteries which crowd the old line of battle from north to south as latrines.’9
Jones was also working on his interpretation of the war in 1927, but In Parenthesis was not published until 1937. It is interesting to set his ‘writing’ (he does not label it as prose or poetry) beside Blunden’s, so different in kind – modernist beside modern – yet arising from the same deeply felt comradely and commemorative impetus. Jones’s Preface begins ‘THIS WRITING IS FOR MY FRIENDS…’: ‘it looks like a war memorial and sounds like a poem’, as Jon Stallworthy comments.10 The title of the first part is ‘THE MANY MEN SO BEAUTIFUL’ from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem that Blunden also keeps returning to:
The many men so beautiful
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Perhaps it was partly as a riposte to Graves that Blunden resurrected his ‘fragment of trench history’, as well as wanting to help his younger brother, Gilbert. Blunden has left barely a trace of De Bello Germanico’s composition. A manuscript copy exists, sixty-odd pages written in his beautiful hand on small sheets of notepaper with the crest of the Royal Sussex regiment, and not one crossing-out or amendment (see example on page vi). The writing becomes more cramped as Blunden continues, whether in haste or because of limited paper supplies there is no way of knowing. Neither can we tell whether this is a fair copy, made for his brother for typesetting clarity, or whether he composed it in just this form. It was pointed out to me that when Blunden took his turn writing the Battalion’s war diary in October 1917, he was able to make his entries without alteration under the most difficult circumstances, so perhaps this handwritten text (now in the Echenberg War Poetry Collection) is indeed the first and only draft.
Gilbert Blunden’s Preface states that the manuscript had ‘slept with cobwebs and dust’ since 1918, when it had been ‘interrupted by the unnerved state into which the country fell’. ‘Unnerved’ is a very distinctive adjective for the atmosphere around the time of the Armistice: would that have been Blunden’s judgement rather than his brother’s? There were 250 copies printed on ordinary paper, priced at 15 shillings, measuring 7½ × 5 inches, and 25 slightly larger copies (8 × 5½ inches) on ‘special paper’ with a leather spine and corners, priced at two guineas. There is only a passing reference to De Bello Germanico in the published correspondence between Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon mentions receiving a copy in a letter of 24 October 1930, but any comment on it goes unrecorded.11
Blunden probably did not have it with him in Japan where, relying on memory and a couple of maps, he wrote his second prose assay, ‘going over the ground again’, as he knew he would always. He was dismissive of De Bello Germanico in the ‘Preliminary’ to Undertones of War:
I tried once before. True, when events were not yet ended, and I was drifted into a backwater. But what I then wrote, and little enough I completed, although in its details not much affected by the perplexities of distancing memory, was noisy with a depressing forced gaiety then very much the rage. To call a fellow creature ‘old bean’ may be well and good; but to approach in the beanish style such mysteries as Mr Hardy forthshadowed in The Dynasts is to have misunderstood, and to pull Truth’s nose. (Undertones, p. xli)
Readers now will scarcely accuse Blunden of ‘the beanish style’; the account has a vivacity that seems neither ‘forced’ nor ‘depressing’ but wonderfully composed – in both senses of the word, both artful and astonishingly serene. It is hard to believe that it was written by a man of twenty-two, immediately after the war.
It begins in mediasres, in contrast to Undertones’ considered opening declaration ‘I was not anxious to go’. Here there is no hint of volition: men are sent like parcels at the direction of an unseen hand. The reader arrives in Béthune alongside the innocent abroad, and there is Dickensian brio in the narrator’s immediate encounters: the ‘betabbed encyclopaedia’ directing them, the misinformation, the chaos, the men ribbing the conductor, all in contrast to the preceding night’s ‘singularly horrible counterfeit sleep’. Blunden’s adjectives – ‘gilded but scorbutic youth’ (suffering from scurvy, so both decorated and yellow) – have a nineteenth-century tang, and this alerts us to his mindset. Here is a sheltered boy of nineteen, brought up in a country schoolmaster’s household, well-schooled at Christ’s Hospital, in love with the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: this is the lens through which he views his experience. It is not pastiche or decoration but thoroughly absorbed reading that surfaces in these verbal flourishes, which decrease and alter as the account continues. Allied to this reading, inseparable from it, is the observant countryman, whose first, relieved thought is that the French fields had ‘a harmless, parcelled, thrifty look’. It is out of this conjunction (close reading and close observation) and disjunction – between the mental and spiritual sustenance they provide, and the circumstances in which he now reads and observes – that Blunden makes his prose and poetry.
In his influential study The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell maintains that Blunden’s archaisms, the rhetorical questions and exclamations ‘reveal a mind playing over a past felt to be not at all military or political but only literary’ – not quite the case, as is clear from Blunden’s references to the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns, for example; he is very conscious that these lands have been contested before. Yet it is literary tradition that matters most to him, and Fussell pinpoints exactly where literary tradition and landscape meet in a brilliantly perceptive paragraph:
But archaism is more than an overeducated tic in Blunden. It is directly implicated in his meaning. With language as with landscape, his attention is constantly on pre-industrial England, the only repository of criteria for measuring fully the otherwise unspeakable grossness of the war. […] Blunden’s style is his critique. It suggests what the modern world would look like to a sensibility that was genuinely civilized.12
What experience could the teenaged Blunden bring to the war but his sensibility, soaked in literature? And afterwards, it was the war that seeped through everything. There was a powerful tension between the need to communicate – imperative, because otherwise the dead were betrayed – and the impossibility of the ‘civilised’ sensibility finding a way to describe the war. Authors ranging from Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence and Henry James to Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud are summoned by the critic Randall Stevenson to attest to the ‘unspeakable’ nature of the war. He quotes from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Talking with Five Thousand People in Edinburgh’, where MacDiarmid castigates teachers, ministers and writers for living off a decomposed vocabulary, ‘Big words that died over twenty years ago/ – For most of the important words were killed in the First World War’.13 In De Bello, Blunden downplays with his choice of noun one aspect of front-line existence: ‘The great defect of war here as elsewhere was the shortage of sleep…’, whereas at about the same point in the narrative of Undertones, he elaborates, looking back on this ‘profound tiredness’ to compare it with the battalion’s feeling in 1918, ‘almost mad for sleep’ under the German offensive Blunden had escaped:
Imagine their message; they will never open their mouths, unless perhaps one hour, when the hooded shape comes to call them away, they lift from the lips of their extremest age a terrible complaint and courage, in phrases sounding to the bystanders like the ‘drums and tramplings’ of a mad dream. (Undertones, p. 34)14
And if the vocabulary for this experience were to be found, would the public want to read such accounts? Ford Madox Ford remarked presciently in 1915: ‘Everyone will want to forget it – it will be bad form to mention it.’15 When Blunden refers to the ‘unnerved’ state of the country, perhaps he means this lack of willingness to learn and feel what the war had been like for the combatants, and this attitude, too, must have dissuaded him from continuing his account. De Bello ends, appropriately enough, with a dog left behind, ‘the very image of misery’.
As well as finding an adequate vocabulary, there was the impossibility of providing an over-arching narrative, and in De Bello Blunden does not attempt this. At the end of Chapter VIII of Undertones there is a brilliant passage conveying the ‘succession of sensations erratically’ occupying Blunden’s mind, and this evocation of the incoherence and chaos of war could perhaps only have been achieved with the passage of time. Stallworthy, in comparing De Bello to Undertones, suggests that the former is ‘not so much revised as shaken like a kaleidoscope’ to make the latter, ‘its bright fragments being incorporated into a larger and richer pattern’.16 There was a tension between being true to sensation and to the framework of the action, but the individual’s perception was the counter to ‘official’ accounts, to newspaper reports: it had the desired stamp of authenticity. Even when Blunden turns to providing ‘A Battalion History’ in 1933, it remains particular; while war historians warned of the limitations of accounts by individuals, they had to admit that ‘on a modern battlefield […] knowledge of events is extraordinarily local’.17
Ford wrote, in a manuscript fragment, about the impossibility of describing the war in general:
Today, when I look at a mere coarse map of the Line, simply to read ‘Ploegsteert’ or ‘Armentières’ seems to bring up extraordinarily coloured and exact pictures behind my eyeballs […] of towers, and roofs, and belts of trees and sunlight; or, for the matter of these, of men, burst into mere showers of blood, and dissolving into muddy ooze; or of aeroplanes and shells against the translucent blue. – But, as for putting them – into words! No: the mind stops dead, and something in the brain stops and shuts down […]18
His biographer, Alan Judd, suggests that to the outsider, ‘the setting seems, perhaps misleadingly, to be of the essence [… but Ford’s] subject was not war but the people, the people war produced’.
Landscape was central to Blunden’s perception by upbringing, and was reinforced by literature, but what the war gave him was experience of a vast range of people, and he felt very keenly his duty to them. He tended not to describe the body, simply – there is no hint of homoeroticism in his work – but the body in motion and as it expressed the spirit, in gesture and in speech. In De Bello he uses initials, having no permission to do otherwise; in Undertones he uses names: this is their memorial. Randall Stevenson suggests that the names of people and places gave a kind of solidity to experience, something to hold on to; yet the names of places were two-edged. Blunden shows this in ‘Trench Nomenclature’, at first with relish, and then with a terrible dismay: ‘Genius named them, as I live! What but genius could compress / In a title what man’s humour said to man’s supreme distress? […] Ah, such names and apparitions! name on name! what’s in a name? / From the fabled vase the genie in his cloud of horror came.’
Describing damage to place was a way of conveying the juxtaposition remarked on by every war writer: the endurance, even the loveliness of nature – of culture, sometimes, where farmland survived – and the denaturing force of constant bombardment, of the endless movement of men and machines. Blunden’s essay ‘War and Peace’ is a concentrated evocation of ‘Nature as then disclosed in fits and starts’, prologue to the epic drama. It has the density of poetry, adjectives working hard: ‘our restless camps’ – both always packing up and re-settling, and in themselves providing scant rest for the men; ‘the dark unfruiting clay’ – nothing grows in it, of course, but later readers hear an echo of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’: ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’; ‘snow untidily tenanted’ by old soldiers; the ‘streaming hazels’ in a storm. This was written in Japan, ‘And if this winter is not contrary to the last, I shall often seem to be in Flanders…’.
Undertones ends with Blunden’s departure from the trenches, and his last sight of the countryside near Ancre, asking whether it could have been ‘more sweetly at rest’, ‘more incapable of dreaming a field-gun?’ He answers his own question: it was to be blown to bits, but he did not anticipate that, still too young to know the war’s ‘depth of ironic cruelty’. ‘Aftertones’ gives us the sequel, Blunden’s return to France post-Armistice, and it is a painful account of privations and divisions, of dishonesty and the disappearance of esprit de corps, of ‘a fantastic chivalry’. The melancholy of these articles about ‘going over the ground’ – ‘The Somme Still Flows’, ‘We Went to Ypres’ have a slightly longer perspective – contrasts with the happiness that suffuses ‘Fall In, Ghosts’, despite the deaths and losses it recalls.
Hew Strachan, in his introduction to a recent edition of Undertones, remarks that Blunden ‘increasingly romanticized the memory which his own writings did so much to keep alive’ (p.xi). Yet the tendency to do so had been there from the outset: in De Bello he says of his very first night at the Front, ‘so early had my love for my new battalion taken root’. In her thought-provoking study Modernism, MaleFriendship, and the First World War, Sarah Cole quotes from the military historian B.H. Liddell Hart:
Now, the war, at any rate on the Western Front, was waged by Battalions, not by individuals, by bands of men who, if the spirit were right, lived in such intimacy that they became part of one another. The familiar phrase, ‘a happy Battalion,’ has a deep meaning, for it symbolises that fellowship of the trenches which was such a unique and unforgettable experience for all who ever shared in it, redeeming the sordidness and stupidity of war by a quickening of the sense of interdependence and sympathy.19
This is a feeling expressed by many memoir-writers of the period: that their most meaningful relationship was with the battalion – ‘There had never been mutual understanding like it in your experience’, Blunden boasts – although the sense of an enclosed male community might have its precedent in English public schools. Cole differentiates between ‘friendship’, put under so much pressure by the hazards of war, and distinguished by affinities and choice, and ‘comradeship’, created by the circumstances of war, in which commitment is to the group rather than the individual. What bound the men was, in the opinion of Robert Graves and fellow officers, ‘regimental pride’. They agreed it was ‘the strongest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit; contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion’.20 Yet, as Blunden found, the battalion itself could dissolve in a few days’ action, as happened to his own on the Somme in 1916. Cole quotes Sassoon:
All I knew was that I’d lost my faith in [both home life and the war] and there was nothing left to believe in except ‘the Battalion spirit’ […] But while exploring my way into the War I had discovered the impermanence of its humanities. One evening we could all be together in a cosy room […] A single machine-gun or a few shells might wipe out the whole picture within a week.21
Blunden accepts this, in ‘Fall In, Ghosts’, but the battalion remains ‘his rock’:
Some faces seemed destined to go on for ever, for a battalion could not be suffered by whatever powers then ruled the mad hour to be quite extinguished or supplanted. In them was concentrated, after the frightful desolations of battle upon battle, the beauty, faith, hope which flowered in the word: the battalion. Or was this an illusion? Very few men lived through the full career of any unit (that perhaps is the more scientific term); and, as those familiar faces became more remote, others became the typical, life-giving, and sustaining presences with – was it the same battalion? It had the same number and place in the line. It was thought the same; but, perhaps, each of us knew a battalion not quite identical with any other man’s […] We come together, once a year, without allusion to the details of our own former shares of the history that concerns us, and we reanimate – the battalion. It is our quaint attempt at catching a falling star.
