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. I found myself pillaging my mothers collection of books after she had fallen out of favour with them. I heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the language of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus."

Poetic passages cannot be effective if they are awash in a sea of otherwise weak prose, which very much felt the case with this work. It really shows that Blunden was relying on memory here - it's as though he has just jotted down some notes and flung them together in a hotch-potch fashion, with the odd eloquently written passage thrown in the mix. Blunden uses his poetic skill to it's fullest effect at times; the problem however is less to do with his prowess in describing for example, the sights and sounds of war, and an awful lot to do with his inability to convey how it felt to be there, part of which stems from the fact that the narrative threads just do not knit together coherently. He fought on two of the war’s great killing grounds, the Somme and Passchendaele. His battalion arrived on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield in September 1916, missing the great slaughters of the summer, but in time for two bloody months in the mud-sodden vicinity of Thiepval Wood, an area of vicious fighting and heavy casualties. 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. Blunden also has a wonderful sense of humour and that peeks out at many places in the book. For example in this sentence –Essentially, it's a stuttering, disjointed, memoir of an officers time in the First World War. At times, there is barely enough time to read one sentence, before the narrative moves on to something else entirely. There are occasional passages in which Blunden waxes lyrical but this is always in relation to his environment and nearly always in relation to something that would be otherwise trivial. The characterisation is close to zero, the narrative is utterly unengaging and the ability of Blunden to allow you inside his head is again, almost non-existent. To really understand this you have to read it a few times. Mr Blundens casual observations of everyday life while waging a war are acute and relentless. 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. There are, of course, descriptions of war, and shells exploding, and people getting killed, but those descriptions are not graphic or gruesome but brief, unlike war memoirs which might be written today. This is not the same type of book as the ones written by Sassoon or Graves. Blunden was a countryman and he describes the effects of war on the landscape with telling effect;

Author, critic, and poet (the latter which for which he is most well known) Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London, and educated at The Queen's College at Oxford. In 1915 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment which he served with through the end of the war. He saw heavy action on the Western Front at both Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. Miraculously he was never severely injured. On the blue and lulling mist of evening, proper to the nightingale, the sheepbell and falling waters, the strangest phenomena of fire inflicted themselves. The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds." 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 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." 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’.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. Already a keen poet when he signed up, Blunden adopts a prose style that is inches away from verse; too often, though, its mannered archaisms get in the way of felt authenticity, at least for a modern reader – at least for me, anyway. Recalling an old farmhouse he stayed in behind the line, for instance, Blunden is moved to this kind of thing: This is different to many of the other memoirs I have read, there is no getting to know other characters in any depth, but there are many memorable moments, including the poignant and well known last sentence; One of the main issues with Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden is it's sheer tedium. I'll keep this review brief but there wasn't a lot that I took away from Blunden's work.