Edward Thomas at Arras

Some lives turn on a sentence spoken by a friend in a field. The man has been writing one thing for twenty years without knowing it is another thing; the friend names it; and the work that had been hiding inside the prose steps forward, late but in time. What follows is only the question of whether the world will leave him long enough to finish.

THE PROSE YEARS

Philip Edward Thomas was born at 14 Lansdowne Gardens, Lambeth, on the third of March 1878, son of a Welsh-born civil servant and Mary Elizabeth Townsend, schooled at St Paul's in Hammersmith and at Lincoln College, Oxford. He married Helen Noble in 1899, fathered three children, and from 1897 onward kept the household alive by the paid-by-the-word reviewing and country essaying that London's literary trade had on offer. Thirty prose books in twenty years: walks in Wales, lives of Jefferies and Borrow, anthologies, topographies, the long grey acreage of the freelance who must take what comes. He walked the chalk roads of southern England in all weathers and wrote down what he saw, and was tired in the particular way of men who have been good at one thing for too long and suspect, without proof, that it is the wrong thing.

THE FIELD AT DYMOCK

In the summer of 1914 the American poet Robert Frost was lodged at Little Iddens in the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, and Thomas walked with him through the lanes and over the stiles week after week. Frost had read the prose. One afternoon, in a field whose name does not survive, Frost told him that what he had been writing for twenty years was, in plain reading, blank verse without the line-breaks. The sentence was not flattery. It was a diagnosis, offered by a man who had only lately found his own voice and recognised the symptoms. The war broke in August. By December Thomas had begun, in a pocket-notebook, to write poems. He took the pseudonym Edward Eastaway to keep the new work clear of the prose accounts. In twenty-eight months he wrote a hundred and forty-three of them.

THE QUESTION OF ENLISTING

He was thirty-seven, married, a father, and exempt by every reasonable measure. Frost had offered him a teaching post in New Hampshire and a passage across. The choice sat on him through the spring of 1915 like weather that would not pass. He answered it, eventually, in a way the prose career had never asked of him. Asked later by Eleanor Farjeon what he was fighting for, he is reported to have bent down, taken up a pinch of English earth, crumbled it between finger and thumb and said literally, for this. He joined the Artists' Rifles in July 1915, transferred to the Royal Garrison Artillery, took his commission, volunteered for overseas service, and in late January 1917 crossed to France as a second lieutenant on the six-inch howitzers. He took the pocket-notebook with him.

EASTER MONDAY MORNING

On the morning of the ninth of April 1917, Easter Monday, first day of the Battle of Arras, the air over the Beaurains-Achicourt position south-east of the town was windless and the light was clear. The chalk country stood very still. The British counter-battery fire was timed to open at twenty past seven precisely; the infantry would go forward on the same minute. Thomas was in a forward observation-post just behind his battery, with the notebook in his coat pocket and a half-written letter to Helen at the Sevenoaks cottage in his other pocket. He had written to her through the previous fortnight in the steady tone of a man who has made his peace with the arithmetic. The notebook was on his body. The body would be sent home through the army effects procedure. The poems, by that route, would reach her within a fortnight whatever happened to him on the morning.

A SECOND ABOVE THE CHALK

The guns opened at twenty past seven. Battery Two-Forty-Four behind him fired its six-inch shell at thirty seconds past the hour, the round travelling out over the observation-post toward the German wire a hundred and fifty yards in front. By the Field Artillery School's later finding the air-column over the salient that morning was temperature-inverted and still, and the burst, when it came, did not dissipate outward in the predicted way. It reflected back along the line of flight. There was a second, perhaps less, in which the morning held everything: the chalk, the line of guns, the notebook against his ribs, the unfinished letter, the field at Dymock three summers behind him, the pinch of earth, Helen at Sevenoaks, the hundred and forty-three poems already written and the ones that would not now be written. He did not have to choose anything. The choosing had been done in the field with Frost and on the gravel path with Farjeon and at the recruiting office in July 1915. What arrived at 7:36 arrived to a man who had already answered.

THE WATCH STOPPED AT 7:36

The concussion wave struck him without leaving a mark on the body. The pocket-watch in his coat stopped at 7:36. He was the only casualty of the battery on the first day of Arras. The notebook in the breast pocket was preserved intact. His men carried him back, and the line moved on through the village of Beaurains and toward Monchy-le-Preux through the day, and the Easter Monday battle that had begun on the minute of his death continued without reference to him for another five weeks.

THE COTTAGE AT SEVENOAKS

Helen Thomas received the telegram at the cottage on the thirteenth of April, four days after the event. She had been waiting for it in the practical way wives of artillery officers waited, with the housework done and the children kept to their lessons. The notebook reached her three weeks later, by the route he had predicted in his letters. She opened it, by her own account in World Without End, and found the poems in his pencil hand, ordered, dated, ready. Selwyn and Blount published the collected Poems by Edward Eastaway in November 1917, six months after his death. The pseudonym held on the title page; the name underneath was already, by then, beginning to be known.

THE ROAD HE OPENED

He is buried at Agny Military Cemetery near Arras, in the row of Royal Garrison Artillery dead of the 9th of April, under a standard Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone. The 1917 first edition stands as the foundation of the modern English nature-poem in its considered line: not the trench-realism of Owen and Sassoon but the older Hardy-and-the-Georgians measure, brought into the twentieth century and made strict. Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008) is the standard critical edition; Matthew Hollis's Now All Roads Lead to France (2011) the standard life. The watch that stopped at 7:36 is held today in the Edward Thomas Memorial Collection at the University of Cardiff: a small brass case, the hands fixed at the minute, kept behind glass on the chalk-coloured shelf where readers come to look at it.

THE MOMENT THE WORK ARRIVES

The hinge in such a life is not the death. The death is only the closing of the parenthesis. The hinge is the sentence in the Gloucestershire field, when a friend says aloud the thing the man has been unable to say to himself, and the twenty wasted years turn out not to have been wasted at all but to have been the slow ground on which the real work could finally stand. Thomas was given twenty-eight months after that sentence. He used them. What remains is a small brass watch behind glass at Cardiff, its hands stopped at twenty-six minutes past the hour on an Easter Monday morning, and a hundred and forty-three poems, and the chalk road going on.