Jason Lublinski
Finley/English 354/Fall Term, 1997
Haverford College
Edmund Blunden's ironically titled "Preparations for Victory" is a terrifyingly bleak poetic examination of the omnipresent fear, tension and self-doubt which often prove as invidious to the soldier on, or preparing for, the field of battle as the actual, physical enemy that he faces. Blunden's poem movingly depicts the protracted psychological struggle between its narrator's hazy, nebulous desire to be staunch and valorous, and his deeper understanding of the violent, possibly agonizing death that most likely awaits him. In its opening lines, "Preparation for Victory" reads almost like a mantra to be recited, talisman-like: it provides a litany, cataloguing both the myriad horrors of battlefield confrontation, "the pestilence that hags/ The valley. . . these great shouting smokes and snarling jags/ Of fiery iron," and the presence of forces, in the natural world, which prove resistant to the vitiating influence of war, the "apples whose bright cheeks none might excel" (symbolic, of course, of the still youthful, ruddy-cheeked men marching off to battle) and "the house as yet unshattered by a shell." (ll. 8-9)
Throughout the first half of the poem, the narrator reminds himself incessantly that although death is both ubiquitous and inexorable, there is much around him that defies its edicts. Soon, though, even his stoical list-compiling, clearly an exercise in active denial, is robbed of its efficacy. The following lines, amongst the most pathos-inspiring in the entire poem, are richly emblematic of the doubts which the young soldier cannot fully banish from his mind:
'I'll do my best,' the soul makes sad reply,
'And I will mark the yet unmurdered tree,
The tokens of dear homes that court the eye,
And yet I see them not as I would see. (ll. 10-13)
Tellingly, the still-pristine tree which the narrator spots growing in a garden is not "unmurdered," but "yet unmurdered." The simple inclusion of the word "yet," with its painful implications about the fragility of life, emphasizes the mounting pessimism of the speaker's outlook, the manner in which death, in all its immutability, has impressed itself upon his consciousness. The soldier's mantra begins to fail him; that which endures today, it seems to him, must surely crumble and decay by tomorrow.
Deprived of his talisman, the narrator begins to see death, or at least manifestations of its potency, in evidence everywhere. As he goes on to state:
Hovering between, a ghostly enemy.
Sickens the light, and poisoned, withered, wan,
The least defiled turns desperate to me. (ll. 14-16)
Even the "least defiled," the most salubrious and unfragmented things that he perceives, begin to turn moribund and defiled in the soldier's eyes. The presence of the "ghostly enemy," grown almost mythically larger-than-life within his mind, unfailingly brings the narrator's thoughts back to confrontation and death, no matter how he tries to escape into comforting self-delusion. He finally has no choice but to prepare himself; not for victory, as the title of the poem mockingly suggests, but for the shattering results that the experience of battle is far more likely to yield.
The poem's ending is, if possible, still a shade more tragic and resignedly despondent than the disintegrating mantra which has preceded it. When the soldier finally reaches the front, war subsumes the totality of his experience. He is soon so steeped in pain, discomfort and the unflagging fear of death that even the elements seem inimical to him: "earth, air are [his] foes." (l. 26) Anxiety and despair overwhelm him entirely, despite his admirable but piteous attempts to remain valiant and steadfast; as Blunden writes, in two of the poem's baldest and most wrenchingly anguished lines,
Pale sleep in slimy cellars scarce allays
With its brief blank the burden. (ll. 23-24)
Even the seemingly placid, solace-promoting realm of sleep no longer offers a respite from the "burden" of terror and insecurity which plague the soldier. Once the possibility of death (and ignominious death, at that) becomes a constant facet of life, there seems to be no escape from the paralyzing doubt and uncertainty that it engenders, except, paradoxically enough, through that which one wishes most to evade: the numbing void of death itself.