A Poet's Memories of Trench War, A Dirty, Wearisome Place, by Edmund Blunden | April 1916 | Episode 109

The author, who wrote what is universally accounted one of the greatest of all the war memoirs, "Undertones of War," served in the Royal Sussex Regiment in France and Flanders. He was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry.

After the war Mr. Blunden returned to a most distinguished literary career. He won the Hawthornden Prize in 1922, was for a time professor of English Literature in Tokyo University, and was later a fellow and tutor of English at Merton, Oxford. 

The poet and scholar was also a born man-at-arms, as the following passage will show.