Feature: Poetry - Why did Edward Thomas volunteer for the First World War?

Top: Jean Moorcroft Wilson at the event with her husband Cecil Woolf, nephew of Virginia Woolf. Inset: Edward Thomas

Published: 18 November, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

The poet Edward Thomas was an improbably volunteer in the First World War, So why did he enlist?  

‘This Is No Petty Case of Right or Wrong’
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe. 
Edward Thomas, 1878-1917 

WHAT drove the great war poet Edward Thomas to lay down his life for his country? Naïvety? Empathy? Perhaps his reputed “suicidal tendencies” drove him to the front line of the conflict?

The question of what motivated Thomas – a married man with three children who was too old to be conscripted – to volunteer to fight on the Western Front, was discussed by the biographer and aca­demic Jean Moorcroft Wilson and historian Sir Martin Gilbert at an event at the Imperial War Museum on the eve of Remembrance Sunday.

Thomas, who died on April 9, 1917, at the Battle of Arras a month before his 39th birthday, was a man of “Hamlet-like indecisive­ness” who disliked jingoism and was prone to hypochon­dria, said Camden Town-based 

Dr Wilson, who is currently writing a biog­raphy of the poet. She asked: “How did Thomas, whose best-known poem ‘Adlestrop’ is about an unaccustomed stop at a deserted country station, come to join the ranks of the greatest First World War poets? Had he, for example, sailed with Robert Frost to America in 1915, as he seriously contemplated doing, his story and his work would have been very different.”

The answer might lie in a surprising journalistic voyage the poet embarked on after the start of the war to discover the “unvarnished truth” about public perceptions of the conflict.

This involved “eaves­dropping”, chatting with people in pubs and sounding out members of all social classes. “He documented the rumours and legends that attended to the war,” said Dr Wilson. “That two million Russians had travelled down through England in secret by night and were waiting for the Germans at Ostend... In Coventry a man argued that the working classes were doing their bit but not the middle classes. Some maintained that the Germans were a rotten lot but there were others who admired German strategy.”

After travelling up and down the country, Thomas concluded that he was “a hypocrite if he loved England but could not fight for her” and signed up. Archway-based Martin Gilbert, who is Sir Winston Churchill’s official biogra­pher and has written more than 80 books, painted a vivid picture of harrowing and often surreal moments amid the stalemate on the Western Front.

He described how “men and horses trotting forwards in an intense snow blizzard were heard singing the Eton boating song Jolly Boating Weather before being pushed back by machine guns”. 

He also quoted a letter from the poet Isaac Rosenberg in which he wrote: “I think I could give some blood­curdling details if I could tell all I see, of buried men blown out of their graves and more, but I will spare you.” 

He ended his talk by reading part of Thomas’s poem “This Is No Petty Case of Right or Wrong”, in which this somewhat unlikely patriot sums up his thoughts about the war.