Blunden's Memories of War                            S

nose suggested the dominance of the Latin poets he read and loved."
In a collection of tributes prepared for his sixty-fifth birthday,
Blunden's wife, Claire, observed that one could almost see memory
tug Blunden back in time:

Some hours and days are replayed to him over and over again by
their association with special dates and kinds of weather, and those
close to him know in particular the force of the First World War and
its anniversaries in this respect. There seem to be hours when the
effon of being in the present is simply a courtesy to his friends and
family and his puzzle is how to take us back to 'then.' ...

Then' began in London on November 1, 1896, when Edmund
Charles was born, the first of Charles Edmund and Georgina Blun¬
den's nine children. Blunden's parents were schoolteachers, a path
that Blunden himself followed during extended periods as a fellow
at Oxford, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University and later at
Hong Kong, and, in 1968, professor of poetry at Oxford, the chair
once occupied by Matthew Arnold.

But all that was still far ahead when the Blundens moved their
growing family from London to Yalding, Kent, where their eldest
son attended grammar school before going off to Christ's Hospital
in West Horsham. Among the distinguished "Blues"—students—
of the previous century, three in particular captured Blunden's
imagination and later inspired some of his best biographical and
critical writing. They were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles
Lamb, and Leigh Hunt. The school became the subject of a gener¬
ally light-hearted history by Blunden, who near the end almost
apologetically introduces the too-swift passage he and others made
from school to the war:

Let me here remember, what I can never forget, the luck which
brought five Old Blues together as officers of one company of the
Royal Sussex. We might have been on holiday together, so hearty
was the brotherhood, so ready with wit and humour, until on July
31st, 1917, all five went over the top at the opening of the ill-starred
Passchendaele offensive, when two never returned. Tice and Coll-
yer, soundest of men.

This painfully understated account of so terrible and personal a
loss is different than the anger and pain that Blunden allowed him-