Thomas · 1917
Edward Thomas at Arras
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.
It is twenty past seven on the morning of Easter Monday, the ninth of April 1917, in a forward observation-post on the Beaurains-Achicourt salient about two miles south-east of Arras in the northern French chalk-country, in clear windless April morning light. He is thirty-nine years old. He is Philip Edward Thomas, born at 14 Lansdowne Gardens, Lambeth, on the third of March 1878, son of the Welsh-born civil servant Philip Henry Thomas and Mary Elizabeth Townsend, schooled at St Paul's Hammersmith and Lincoln College Oxford, in the twenty-second year of his grub-Street prose career as a paid-by-the-word book-reviewer-and-country-prose-essayist (about thirty published prose books since 1897, the financial-foundation of his marriage to Helen Noble in 1899 and the three children).
He has, in his coat-pocket, the pocket-notebook in which he has been writing poems since the December of 1914 (when Robert Frost, the American poet who had been living in the Gloucestershire village of Dymock for the previous summer with Thomas's walking-companion-encouragement, had told him, by the conversation in the Gloucestershire field, that the prose Thomas had been writing for twenty years was, in plain reading, blank verse without line-breaks). The pocket-notebook contains, on the ninth of April 1917, the final manuscript of about a hundred and forty-three poems Thomas has written in the twenty-eight-month period since the Frost conversation.
He thinks, by his letters to Helen of the previous fortnight: the Easter-Monday is the first-day-of-the-battle. The six-inch howitzer battery I command will, on the first-day, be firing about two hundred shells a minute on the pre-arranged ranging-fire pattern. The pre-arranged pattern is for the British infantry breakthrough on the Beaurains salient at twenty past seven.
He thinks: the poems are in the pocket-notebook. The pocket-notebook is in the coat-pocket. The coat is on the body. If I am killed today, the pocket-notebook will, by the army effects-procedure, be sent to Helen at the Sevenoaks cottage within a fortnight.
The British counter-battery fire opens on the ranging-pattern at twenty past seven precisely. The six-inch shell from the Battery Two-Forty-Four behind Thomas's observation-post is fired at twenty-past-seven-and-thirty-seconds; the shell-burst is, on the pre-arranged range, about a hundred and fifty yards in front of Thomas's position, in the German front-line wire. The concussion of the shell-burst is, by the Field Artillery School after-action report, significantly stronger than the pre-calculated values for the meteorological conditions of the 9th April; the anomaly is, by the school's later finding, the windless and temperature-inverted air-column over the Beaurains salient on the morning of the ninth.
Edward Thomas is killed by the concussion-blast wave at 7:36 in the morning of the ninth of April 1917. The blast does not leave a visible mark on the body. The pocket-watch in his coat-pocket is stopped at 7:36 (the watch is, today, in the Edward Thomas Memorial Collection at the University of Cardiff). The pocket-notebook with the hundred-and-forty-three poems is preserved intact.
Helen Thomas received the telegram of his death at the Sevenoaks cottage on the thirteenth of April 1917, four days after the event. The pocket-notebook reached her three weeks later. The collected Poems by Edward Eastaway (the pseudonym Thomas had been using since 1915 to keep the poetry separate from the grub-Street prose) were published by Selwyn and Blount in November 1917, six months after his death. The 1917 first edition is the foundational text of the modern English nature-poem tradition. Thomas is buried at the Agny Military Cemetery near Arras, in the row of Royal Garrison Artillery dead of the 9th April. The grave is, on the Agny pathway, marked by a standard Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone. The Edna Longley critical edition of Thomas's Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is the current standard critical edition; the Matthew Hollis biography Now All Roads Lead to France (2011) is the current standard biography.