Analytics Consent

We use analytics to understand better how people are using this site.

Permit Google Analytics?

Yes No
Skip to main content
Read page text
page 14
xii FALL IN, GHOSTS 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
page 15
INTRODUCTION xiii 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.

Page Text

View plaintext

xii

FALL IN, GHOSTS

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

Read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content