Book description
In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First
World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences
as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Enlisting at the age of
twenty in 1916, Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the
Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not
only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his
compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the endurance,
heroism, and despair found among the officers and men of his battalion.
The selection of Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural
landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in
the Flanders fields.
