"An extended pastoral elegy in prose is what Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) may be called. Whatever it is (G. S. Fraser once called it "the best war poem" and printed some of it as free verse in the London Magazine), no one disagrees that together with Sassoon's and Graves's "memoirs" it is one of the permanent works engendered by memoirs of the war. Its distinction derives in large part from the delicacy with which it deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony. If Spenser or Milton or Gray or Collins or Clare or the author of Thyrsis had fought in the Great War, any one of them could have used Blunden's final image to end a memoir of it. With a due sense of theatrical costume and an awareness of a young subaltern's loving responsibility for the flock under his care, Blunden brings Undertones of War to a close by calling himself "a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat" (314). That characterization is English to a fault, and beautiful."
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Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), pp. 254-255
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Charles_Blunden
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Edmund Charles Blunden
Edmund Charles Blunden (November 1, 1896 – January 20, 1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Although not one of the top trio of English World War I writers, his works exerted important influence.
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