'War Is an Ancient Imposter'

“It was a sunny morning, that of July 1, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil.” Without his experience during the Great War, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) might have become a nature poet. He loved John Clare’s poetry (he named two of his children John and Clare) and Gilbert White. He was a nineteenth-century man in many ways, born to write pastorals. Instead, as his friend Siegfried Sassoon said, Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The passage above begins his essay “The Somme Still Flows,” written in 1929 and collected in The Mind’s Eye (Jonathan Cape, 1934). He continues: “But, as the world soon knew, the music of the sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at that incessant drumming and the rattling of the windows. That night an even…

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