Undertones of War

In one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in France and Flanders. Enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendale, 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 - among the men of his battalion.

This volume, which contains a selection of Blunden's war poems, also reveals his close affinity with the natural world: the 'shepherd in a soldier's coat' whose love of the rural landscape gave him some refuge from the terrible betrayal enacted in Flanders fields.