Blunden: No time for the present

I noted that in Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden juxtaposes the pastoral landscape and its wreckage by modern, industrial warfare. He also juxtaposes different time-scales, gliding between the daily minutiae of his army life and larger time-frames that dwarf such mundane events. This is evident from his use of the term 'ancient', which serves usually to cast our view back to the medieval and early modern life of the French churches and towns along the front.

Present events are made to seem even more trivial when Blunden gestures at the vast stretches of nature's prehistory. Take this passage, for instance:

Date yourself 1916, and come, little as you wanted to stir this afternoon; the autumn day is moody, the ground churned and greasy; leave Martinsart Wood, and the poor dear platoon scrubbing equipment, coaxing stray dogs, hunting for canteens and scrawling letters. We cross the Nab, that sandy sunk road, and, if we are not mad, the ancient sequestered beauty of an autumn forest haunts there, just over the far ridge. Aveluy Wood, in thy orisons be all our sins remembered. (Blunden, Undertones of War)

But, as Blunden adds, 'Within, it is strangely uninhabited.' There is nothing in the Wood that will say prayers ('orisons') or remember him. There, in the Wood, is only indifference to his travails.

Consider the nuances of this next passage, in which Blunden mentions a train schedule from the recent past, something that has been suspended in the present geopolitical crisis:

But here we leave the road, and file along the railway track, which, despite all the incurable entanglements of its telegraph wires, might yet be doing its duty; surely the 2.30 for Albert will come round the bend puffing and clanking in a moment? Below, among mighty trees of golden leaf, and some that lie prone in black channels as primeval saurians, there is a track across the lagooned Ancre. (Blunden, Undertones of War)

The present crisis sends him away from the recent past of train schedules and closer to a prehistoric, and even pre-human, time.

The larger time-frame can be a refuge. When Blunden is dodging enemy fire, his attention is locked within the present instant as he flees into a subterranean shelter. He there finds that 'time-values have changed for a moment from furious haste to geological calm when one enters that earthy cave with its bunk beds, squatting figures under their round helmets, candles stuck longways on the woodwork, ....' (Blunden, Undertones of War)

Blunden's focus is repeatedly expelled from its refuge, cast away from an ancient, other existence of geological calm and back into the violence of the present. As his unit marches back to the front after some R & R, Blunden observes that 'the failing ancient sun shone on the wide and shallow Ancre by Aveluy, and the green fancy-woodwork of the mill belonged to another century, indeed another existence, as we crossed the long causeway leading from the pleasures of rest, and turned along the opposite hillside with its chalky excavations, old trenches and spaces of surviving meadow-like green, towards the new arena.' His trajectory from the rest site towards the front is in parallel with the temporal references: from the ancient age of the sun to the more recent century in the mill's past to the still more recent signs ('old trenches') of earlier stages in the War to their next arena.

Hans Blumenberg described our attempts to fend off time's indifference -- its 'eternal silence' -- by using the narratives of myth and history to blanket time with meaning. But what if the present is unbearable? Time's indifference might then seem like solace. Perhaps it appeared so to Blunden, and perhaps he fixated on the indifference by resorting to the larger time-scale of prehistory.

These excerpts from Blunden's book echo an episode in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, up to that moment an enthusiastic soldier, lies injured at the Battle of Austerlitz he gazes at the sky -- 'that lofty, righteous and kindly sky' (as Tolstoy says). The lofty sky with its ancient sun dwarfs the battlefield. The war now seems pointless, and its great practitioners (or Napoleon at least) are exposed as vain and trivial men.

There are, of course, differences between this episode and the above passages from Blunden's book. After all, a 'kindly' sky can't be wholly indifferent. Still, in both books the traumatized soldier finds succour in a larger perspective from which present crises 'are as nothing'.

Follow-ups to recent posts

No book has sent me to dictionaries more often than Blunden's Undertones of War, and some of the terms in that work can't be found in recent dictionaries. Case in point: 'Ephydriad'. While describing a withdrawal from the Somme, Blunden says that his unit is 'not the same "we" who in the golden dusty summer tramped down into the verdant valley, even then a haunt of every leafy spirit and the blue-eyed ephydriads, now Nature’s slimy wound with spikes of blackened bone'. This is one of the many examples in Blunden's book of subverted pastoral (about which Paul Fussell wrote), or, in the more Tolkienesque terms of my previous post, of a leafy shire deadened and transformed into a 'Dead Marshes'. But where did Blunden dig up that word 'ephydriad'? In Leigh Hunt's poetry. Blunden wrote Hunt's biography, and Hunt wrote a poem called 'The Ephydriads'.

In my post on books about WW1 by Canadian veterans of that war, I noted that Ford Madox Ford wrote a 'note by way of a Preface' for Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly (1929). Ford there describes a strange 1920's conception of what the war was like. He says that 'many imagine that the late struggle was for those engaged in it a perpetual picnic varied with sexual jamborees' (emphasis added). It seems incredible that anyone could have thought of WW1 in that fashion, but I guess it was just such ignorance that the literature of disillusion was meant to combat. As to why Ford's contribution to Acland's book was not called simply a Preface, the reason must be that the published version of Acland's novel is not the version that Ford read. Acland says so in a note that follows Ford's piece. While Ford liked the novel, he apparently didn't like it enough to re-read it after Acland's last batch of revisions.

In that same post on WW1 books, I referred to Philip Child's novel God's Sparrows (1937). Apparently, the CBC aired a ½-hour drama based on that novel on November 12, 1970. It was produced by David Peddie, directed by Peter Carter, and starred Donnelly Rhodes and Tim Henry. This TV show was part of a series called Theatre Canada: Canadian Short Stories, other episodes of which were based on the work of Morley Callaghan and Alice Munro. Ah, the good old days.

In my post on May Sinclair, I referred to Mary Augusta Ward's novel Robert Elsmere. I learned from Siris that Miriam Burstein has just released a new, annotated edition of Ward's novel.  

Canadian Headquarters Staff (1918) Sir William Nicholson

'The great discovery of the exhibition is Nicholson's 8ft-high group portrait of The Canadian Headquarters Staff showing the officers standing in front of a giant photograph of the bombed-out shell of the Medieval Cloth Hall at Ypres.'

Tolkien, Blunden, and the Great War

Reading Blunden's Undertones of War inspired me to have a look at material about the Somme campaign and its literary representations. I knew there were many texts about the Somme, but I was surprised to learn of the battles' influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's work.

Tolkien was in the Somme offensive in 1916. He was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He took part in one of the many attacks on the Schwaben Redoubt, a heavily fortified strongpoint in the German line. There are two books about the war's impact on Tolkien's fiction: John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle Earth and Janet Brennan Croft's War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Among the passages in Tolkien's work that seem to echo his WW1 experience is the Journey through the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings. Additionally, Lisa Jardine sees a reference to tanks (first used in WW1) in connection with Morgoth's iron dragons, which appeared in a story that Tolkien wrote during a leave of absence in 1916 or early 1917. The iron dragons were 'iron monsters in the likeness of dragons, which might cross difficult terrain and harbour legions of orcs to transport them safely across the open plain.'

In the comments for Jardine's piece, Rev. John Waddington-Feather recounts a story told by Michael Tolkien, according to which the Dark Riders were based on WW1 German Uhlans.

WW1 German Uhlan. Will somebody get that horse a mask?!

According to M. Tolkien (via Waddington-Feather), J. R. R. Tolkien was caught behind enemy lines while riding a cavalry horse and had to flee three pursuing Uhlans. Looking back, Tolkien could see the Uhlans' 'skull and crossbone helmet badges'. This gave rise to a recurring nightmare from which arose the Nazgul.

Understandably, the tale breeds skepticism, but it could be true. Strictly speaking, Uhlans didn't wear skull and crossbone badges, but British soldiers didn't speak so strictly. They referred to all German cavalry as uhlans, and there were at least three German cavalry units in WW1 that adorned their headgear with the macabre decoration. There were the 'Black Brunswickers', who formed the 17th Hussars Regiment, and two regiments of Life Hussars (more here and here). While there weren't large hussar units on the western front in 1916, several such units were dispersed in smaller groups among the infantry battalions all along the front. Moreover, while the steel helmet had already been introduced by 1916, some cavalry men retained their old skull-and-crossbones hats. As to the question of why Tolkien, a signaler, was riding a horse -- well, signalers had to lay and repair the wire along which their signals ran, and it's well within the bounds of possibility that one who had been tasked with such chores would borrow a horse. After all, if a chaplain such as Canon Scott could use a horse to get around, why couldn't signalers use horses, too?

Aaron Isaac Jackson published a good article about the War's influence on Tolkien's work. His focus is The Hobbit. Jackson says,

In The Hobbit Tolkien is explicit about what they [the goblins] represent, linking them expressly to the mechanized warfare that characterized the First World War: ‘It is not unlikely' [quoting Tolkien] 'that they ... invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them’. (Aaron Isaac Jackson, 'Authoring the Century: J. R. R. Tolkien, the Great War and Modernism', English, 59 [2010], pp. 44–69, at p. 61) 

Jackson notes that as Bilbo and his company approach Smaug's lair, '‘Neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished’ greet their approach, echoing the destruction by war of the green farmlands of France.' (Ibid., pp. 61-2)

The Schwaben Redoubt by William Orpen (1917) -- the desolation of Smaug?

It's here that I see a similarity between Tolkien and Blunden. Both went to France with an iron-clad pastoralism that survived the War. Blunden called himself a 'pastoralist at war'. In his pre-war poem 'The Preamble', he wrote, 'I sing of the rivers and hamlets and woodlands of Sussex and Kent'. In 1915, he finds himself armed in a foreign territory where the hamlets and woodlands are ravaged and burned. He confronts full-bore the lethal machinery that threatens to obliterate the green fields and woods but retains his pastoral commitment throughout the conflict. This is the conservative strain in both authors' writing. Blunden, like Tolkien, sees a beloved shire under threat from the noise and violence of the modern machinery yet salvages, in his imagination at least, a verdant homeland.

Chateau Wood, Ypres (1917)

World War I books (mostly Canadian)

'Paths of Glory' by C. R. W. Nevinson (1917)

The First World War centenary will soon be upon us. I've been looking for some good books about the Great War. As noted in a previous post, I've plunged into Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War. Other classic books about the War are Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's books, and, of course, there's Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. I've already read Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel.

With the help of the University of South Carolina Press' site for The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series (and this list of WWI fiction), I've been able to find some good books by British, German, Australian, American, and French authors, but it's proven difficult to find Canadian books about the War. Of course, there's Timothy Findley's The Wars, which was mandatory reading in my high school and which won the 1977 Governor General's Fiction Award, but I'm looking for novels or autobiographical works by people who served in the War.

One frustrating matter in my search is that some apparent Canadians turn out to have been Yankees. For instance, I was excited to find a well-reviewed book by a veteran of the Canadian Expeditionary Force named Charles Yale Harrison, but he was born in Philly and spent most of his life in NY. (His book, Generals Die in Bed is online.) Another American who signed up in the Canadian army was Humphrey Cobb, whose Paths of Glory (review) was the basis of a movie by Stanley Kubrick.

It looks like many of the Canadian books were superficial exercises in 'rah, rah' patriotism. There are two books by Canadians, though, that look to be more realistic and rewarding.

First, there's Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly. Published in 1929, it has long been out of print, and the only used copies that I can find cost more than $100. Thankfully, it looks like a new edition is being prepared by Dundurn. The novel includes many literary allusions (inc. some to Nietzsche). Ford Madox Ford wrote the preface. The book received warm praise in a letter to Acland from Bertrand Russell. Here's the favourable review that ran in the New York Times.

Acland, a Torontonian, worked in advertising and, in 1942, began six years of employment in the 'secretariat of the Prime Minister of Canada' (according to a note in the NY Times [Jan. 28, 1949]). After that, he returned to advertising and was selected to head the Toronto office of Day, Duke, & Tarleton, Inc. (says the same NY Times note), a New York agency that was created in 1946 'by veterans of J. Walter Thompson Co., Foote, Cone & Belding, Lennen & Mitchell and William Esty & Co. in New York' (sounds Mad Men-ish).

The other Canadian novel is God's Sparrows (1937) by Philip Child, who was an artillery officer from Hamilton, Ontario. He became an English professor at the University of Toronto. Unlike Acland, Child wrote several other novels. He won a Governor General's Literary Award in 1949 for Mr. Ames Against Time.

Why are there so few good WWI books by Canadian veterans of the War? George Simmers conjectures that 'the reaction in the Dominions against the disillusioned war books of the late twenties and early thirties went further than that in Britain.' Perhaps the hostile climate discouraged other disillusioned veterans with literary talent from writing publicly about their experience.

For more information about the Canadian literature on the Great War, see this entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia and this site at Library and Archives Canada. Also, there are many relevant posts on Brian Busby's blog and at a blog that is devoted to Canadian war literature. There's also this pdf by Eric Thompson, 'Canadian Fiction and the Great War'.

'Canadian Gun Pit' by Wyndham Lewis (1918)

Update: There are two Canadian autobiographical works about WWI that have received generally good reviews. First, there's Ghosts Have Warm Hands (1968) by William R. Bird, who was in the Canadian Black Watch. This title is an updated version of Bird's And We Go On (1930). Next, there's The Great War as I Saw It (1922) by Canon Frederick George Scott, an Anglican chaplain. From the table of contents, it looks like this is an account of several of the main battles in which Canadians fought. Here's a 1991 article about this book; and here's Monique Dumontet's doctoral dissertation at the University of Manitoba as a pdf: 'Lest we Forget': Canadian Combatant Narratives of the Great War (2010).

He didn't use the example of 'game' but ...

I'm reading a 19th-century author, Richard Whately, who was the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. He wrote the first modern (not entirely Aristotelian) logic textbook in the English-speaking world (Elements of Logic [1826] -- which influenced C. S. Peirce). He also wrote an influential textbook on rhetoric (Elements of Rhetoric [1828]). Both works were standard textbooks in the UK and US for many decades.

In Elements of Rhetoric, Whately disabuses the reader of

the common error of supposing that a general term has some real object, properly corresponding to it, independent of our conceptions; — that, consequently, some one definition in every case is to be found which will comprehend every thing that is rightly designated by that term; — and that all others must be erroneous: whereas, in fact, it will often happen, as in the present instance, that both the wider, and the more restricted sense of a term, will be alike sanctioned by use, (the only competent authority,) and that the consequence will be a corresponding variation in the definitions employed; none of which perhaps may be fairly chargeable with error, though none can be framed that will apply to every acceptation of the term. (Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric [1828], p. 2)

Boyd's allusions to Blunden in Waiting for Sunrise

I'm in the midst of two books about WWI: William Boyd's novel, Waiting for Sunrise, and Edmund Blunden's classic memoir Undertones of War. There appear to be several allusions to the latter work in the former one. For example, in both books the main character begins his military service in a unit called 'C company' -- in Blunden's book, this was the C company of the Royal Sussex Regiment's 11th Battalion. (Update [June 13]: Boyd's main character joined the East Sussex Light Infantry, which appears to have been a militia unit that became, in 1881, the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment.)

Blunden was a cricket fanatic and mentioned that one of his fellow officers, Charlwood, had played for Sussex. In Boyd's book, the protagonist (Lysander Rief) encounters two cricketers who play for Sussex, Vallance Jupp and Joseph Vine.

Rief is sent to a part of the western front near Festubert. Blunden's service on the western front was in the vicinity of Festubert, about which he wrote two poems ('In Festubert' and 'A House in Festubert').

Finally, in both books there are references to the Battle of Aubers (which occurred in 1915 as part of a larger operation that involved a Canadian division).

Here's a passage from Blunden's book:

Such as it was, the Old British Line at Festubert had the appearance of great age and perpetuity; its weather-beaten sandbag wall was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is an obstinate remoteness about a skull.

Update (June 28): Maybe I was wrong. In the Harper Perennial edition of Boyd's  book, Boyd recommends several books about the main topics, settings, etc. of Waiting for Sunrise, but he doesn't mention Blunden. Regarding books about WW1, Boyd recommends Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.

Gorey-ish note in Mind (1879)

I was combing through the earliest issues of Mind, the preeminent philosophy journal in the UK, when I found this odd note by Henry Maudsley called 'Alleged Suicide of a Dog'. The opening paragraph contains this gruesome bit:

One Journal believes there is a well- authenticated story of a cat which, having had its kittens drowned was so grief-stricken at its bereavement that it deliberately committed suicide by strangling itself in the fork of the branch of a tree. The writer's experience of life in the country cannot have been very great, or he would have heard of other instances in which cats running up trees after birds had slipped and, being caught in a forked branch, had been strangled. Had he extended his inquiries he might even have become acquainted with instances in which the same fate had overtaken human beings. --Henry Maudsley, Mind, 4 (1879): 410-413.