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Blunden
was born in London, brought up in Kent and educated at Christ's
Hospital, Horsham, where he became senior classical scholar.
In 1914, he gained a classics scholarship to Queen's College,
Oxford, but enlisted instead in the Royal Sussex Regiment
in 1915. He had written his first poems at school and continued
to write while he trained with the regiment.
He took
part in some of the worst fighting of the war on the Western
Front between 1916 and 1918, on the Somme and at Ypres, and
was awarded the Military Cross. His active service ended in
the spring of 1918 when he was sent back to Britain to recover
from a combination of exhaustion and asthma, made worse by
exposure to gas. He was demobilised in 1919 and belatedly
took up his scholarship at Oxford. He pursued an academic
career, and succeeded Rudyard Kipling as 'literary adviser'
to the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission.
In his later years, he continued to attend battalion reunions
and revisited his old battlefields. He died at the age of
seventy-seven.
Also of
interest:
FirstWorldWar.com
- Edmund Blunden
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