The First World War had far more influence on subsequent literature than did the experience of the Second World War. The "Poets of the Great War" series was launched recently with a well-received volume on Wilfred Owen, a gifted poet who was killed a week before the Armistice. Edmund Blunden represents the second type of war poet, one who survived the war but whose later career, in this case spanning nearly sixty years, was forever marked by his wartime experiences.

Blunden wrote one of the most acclaimed memoirs of World War I, an epic poem on the Third Battle of Ypres, and succeeded the late Rudyard Kipling as literary adviser to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1936. This heavily illustrated account surveys all of the sites associated with Blunden's wartime career, and identifies all of the locations and incidents referred to in his writings.