WAR WITHOUT TRAPPINGS.

Hokitika Guardian, 24 January 1929, Page 2

WAR WITHOUT TRAPPINGS.

MR BLUNDEN’S KINK BOOK

HATRED OE RAIDING

“ Undertones of War,” by Edmund Blunden.

Mr Blunden lias achieved a great triumph in this sombre study. He shows war as it really is, yet there is no over-emphasising the anguish. Tolstoi has done the same in ” -Sevastopol,” in some ways the most extraordinary book ever written about war, and in bis ” War and Peace.” But Mr Blundell’s work does not yield to Tolstoi’s in insight and noble handling of a terrible theme. The old fables are very severely handled by him. There is none of the absurd pretending that British soldiers liked to be sent into the line inadequately equipped or to stand lor hours up to their knees in ice-cold wafer.

“ Who that bad been there for tint a few hours could ever forget the strange spirits and mad lineaments of Cuincby? A mining sector such as this was never wholly lost the sense of hovering horror. . . . The ground became torn and vile, the poisonous breath of fresh explosions skulked all about, and the mud which choked the narrow passages stank as one pulled through it, and through the twisted, disused wires running mysteriously onward. Much lime was wanted at Cuinchy, and that had its ill-savour and often its horrible meaning.” The men lived and moved under the constant menace of death: “ Not far away from the shnfthead a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. I went along three firebays; one shell burst behind me; ] saw its smoke faint out, and ! thought all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place.recalled me; the shell bad burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s messtin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood . . . be the only answer? At this moment, while we look with intense,fear at so strange a horror, the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.”

Nor did the troops view with any enthusiasm the business of raiding: “ I can say that our greatest distress at this period (1917.) was due to tliai short and dry word “ raid.” ... If was as bad to raid as to be raided and the battalion was able to give an interpretation of that- before long. . . .

The most brutal bombardment began on the right of our line Presently the bombardment ended. . . As 1 went along that lonely little trench I found that there were many new details o’ landscape, great holes and junks and jags of timber . . . the raiding bombing post soon after appeared, trampled, pulverised, blood-stained, its edges slurred into the level of the general wilderness. . . . Our own dead had been carried away, but just ahead v G re stretched two or three of the laidcis.

POET’S INSIGHT,

Mr Blundell early in the war mad* his reputation as a poet; and it iomains true that only a poet could see and discern the inner secrets oi the war as lie has done.

A supplement of “poetical interpret tations and variations’’ is appended by him to his prose, and if the poetry is not as good as the prose it is still iomarkable. These are a 'few lines from “ The Zonnebeke Road”: Now where Haymnrket starts, That is no place for soldiers with weak hearts. The minemverfers have it to the inch. kook, how the snow-dust whisks along the road Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch In this east wind; the low sky like a load Hangs over, a dead-weight.