The line, "And I will mark the yet unmurdered tree," from "Preparations for Victory," sounds the constant note in Blunden's poetry of the war about the murder or death of nature. Other lines from these poems immediately come to mind, perhaps most immediately the great condensed line of summary from his extraordinary recreation of the experience of battle during Third Ypres: "A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder." For Blunden it was the brutal assault on the very life of the natural world, on that "sweet countryside," which was as painful, and as memorable, as the death of fellow soldiers. Most poignantly, in a poem which concerns the same element of traumatic memory as Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience," it is the murdered landscape which returns, even in the midst of renewed pastoral life, in England, in safety, after the war's conclusion. See Blunden's "1916 seen from 1921":
In the seminar in 1997, Elizabeth Jackson has wrote on this poem. Note her conclusion: "For several years, Blunden's world was the war. He must remember, and he must begin the long process of recuperation and rejuvenation." (Follow this link, EJackson, to see the complete text of her paper.) Andrea Walker focused on the poems, "La Quinque Rue" and "The Midnight Skaters," where she considered Blunden's enduring testimony to "his awareness of the War's irreversible destruction of a pastoral innocence." She quotes the scholar Thomas Mallon, from his study, Edmund Blunden : "[T]he war changed nature permanently for Blunden. The pastoral world forever after prompted his memories of its destruction." Follow this link, AWalker, to read the complete text of her paper). With this may be compared Jean Otsuki's current commentary (1999): "Further, whereas the poet gestures his soul to look to the 'gardens' (7) of undamaged pastoral to gain reassurance that the war has not destroyed all, his evocation of a house 'yet unshattered by a shell' (9) points more poignantly to the pastoral's imminent destruction than it does to its current intactness." (Follow this link, JOtsuki, to read the complete text of her paper.) Andrew Kerr points out how even the rivers are mortal in Blunden's wounding vision of the life of nature; in "The Ancre at Hamel: Afterwards," the "river has also become a scarred casualty of war." Kerr continues: "Even as the speaker tries to enjoy the victory, the river's voice speaks to him and pulls him away from the party." In Kerr's reading, the poet has such "an understanding of the river's anguish that he feels as if he and the river share a sad existence: 'its stream ran through my heart; / I heard it grieve and pine / As if its rainy tortured blood / had swirled into my own.'" (Follow this link, AKerr, to read the complete text of his paper.)
See Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory," where he notes the line from David Jones: "Wounded trees and wounded men . . .are very much an abiding image in my mind as a hang-over from the War" (p. 145). Fussell goes on to study this key aspect of the poetry of the Great War, and its part in Blunden's work particularly, in the chapter, "Arcadian Recourses" (pp. 231-69 ). Of Blunden he notes:
"An extended pastoral elegy in prose is what Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) may be called" (p. 254).
"For the Blunden the countryside is magical. It is as precious as English literature, with which indeed it is almost identical. As the author of the critical study Nature in English Literature (1929), Blunden can easily be imagined writing a companion study, English Literature in Nature. . . .
"To Blunden, both the countryside and English literature are 'alive,' and both have 'feelings.' They are equally menaced by the war. And the French countryside is little different. For it to be brutally torn up by shells is a scandal close to murder. The pathos and shock of it are what Blunden returns to repeatedly in Undertones of War. . . ." (pp. 258-59).