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Spine a little dull, lettering-label rubbed, free endpapers embrowned, some faint spotting of prelims. With the (William Nicholson) bookplate of Percy Withers; ticket of W. Heffer, Cambridge. Dedicated to Siegfried Sassoon. "This wrath's oncoming / Found four of us together in a pillbox, / Skirting the abyss of madness with light phrases, / White and blinking, in false smiles grimacing. / The demon grins to see the game, a moment / Passes, and - still the drum-tap dongs my brain / To a whirring void - through the great breach above me / The light comes in with icy shock and the rain / Horridly drips. Doctor, talk, talk! if dead / Or stunned I know not; the stinking powdered concrete, / The lyddite turns me sick - my hair's all full / Of this smashed concrete. O I'll drag you, friends, / Out of the sepulchre into the light of day: / For this is day, the pure and sacred day. / And while I squeak and gibber over you, / Out of the wreck a score of field-mice nimble, / And tame and curious look about them. (These / Calmed me, on these depended my salvation.) . . ." Percy Withers (1867-1945), poet and medical practitioner, was a great befriender of poets (notably A.E. Housman). Two letters to him from Blunden dated 1922 are in the Withers collection at Somerville College, Oxford. Seller Inventory # 33M100090
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