Miraculously, Edmund Blunden survived the war, but suffered the effects of it for the rest of his life- both mentally and physically. His lungs were damaged due to a gas attack he survived in 1917, and the emotional scars from his war experiences led him to explore the topic over and over in both his prose and his poetry. He did write about other things as well, of course but, haunted by the past, he often returned to it when he put pen to paper. In Can You Remember? Blunden looks back across the space of two decades and asks himself exactly what, and how, he remembers about the terrible events of the war years.
Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.
Of all that prodigious scene
There seems scanty loss,
Though mists mainly float and screen
Canal, spire and fosse;
Though commonly I fail to name
That once obvious Hill,
And where we went and whence we came
To be killed, or kill.
Those mists are spiritual
And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
Of which I am sure;
Of which, at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.