As troops returning from Iraq begin to tell their harrowing stories of mindless violence, civilian casualties, and lives changed forever by the horrors of war, our society is reminded—yet again—of the psychological battle scars that endure long after a deployment ends. Although Edmund Blunden’s memoirs were first published in 1928, his unforgettable account of World War I trench warfare has never been more relevant.

In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, Blunden tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross. Undertones of War, which also includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields, deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between The Naked and the Dead and The Things They Carried.
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