Thomas

At twenty past seven on the morning of Easter Monday, the ninth of April 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, in a forward observation-post just behind the front line at the Beaurains-Achicourt forward battery position outside Arras in northern France, Second Lieutenant Philip Edward Thomas of the Royal Garrison Artillery, thirty-nine years old, was killed by the blast wave of one of his own battery's six-inch howitzer shells (the shell had been fired from the battery behind him about thirty seconds earlier; the shell-burst, by an unrecorded meteorological anomaly of the windless April morning, had failed to dissipate the concussion outward and had reflected the blast back along the line of flight). The blast was strong enough to stop the watch in Thomas's pocket at 7:36 and to kill him by concussion without leaving a visible mark on the body. He was the only casualty of the battery on the first day of Arras. He had been a published poet for the previous eighteen months only; his first collection Poems would be published posthumously in November 1917 under his pseudonym Edward Eastaway. By the careful judgment of every later English literary historian (Edna Longley, Matthew Hollis), Thomas is the foundational figure of the modern English nature-poem tradition and the most-influential English-language poet of the First World War on the Hardy-and-the-Georgians side, against the trench-realism of Owen and Sassoon.

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