As Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out in her recent powerful biography of Edward Thomas
Though Thomas would choose not to include such grim details in his own poetry, he was ahead of many of his contemporaries in facing the reality of war.
Wilson is referring here to Thomas’s last commissioned book of prose, a biographical history of The Life of the Duke of Marlborough published by Chapman & Hall in 1915, the year in which Thomas joined up. The timely nature of a book on the great early eighteenth-century military leader, the victor of Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708) and Malplaquet (1709), was not lost on the publishing firm who announced on the book’s jacket ‘The achievements of the first Duke of Marlborough acquire particular interest at the present time’. The book is also a rare record of Thomas’s feelings about the First World War as its writing and publication took place in the year in which the Lusitania was sunk and Zeppelin raids were commenced over London.
When the French were besieging the allies with Charles III in Barcelona in 1706, the English soldiers threw the enemy’s grenades back to them. They fought in armour by lantern and candle in galleries thirty or forty feet underground at Tournay; they mined and countermined, and blew men into the air or were blown up, by hundreds at a time; they were suffocated by smoke, buried alive by falling earth, drowned by inundations; meeting unexpectedly sometimes these moles fought by mistake with friends. What with cannon, bombs, grenades, small shot, boiling pitch, tar, oil, brimstone and scalding water, the English Grenadiers had scarce six sound men in the company after the siege of Lille.
It might be worth comparing this passage with Wilfred Owen’s late poem ‘Strange Meeting’ to give some context to what might appear, at a first glance at the poem, to be a supernatural and symbolic ‘meeting’.
In the second chapter of his book, given the heading ‘The Handsome Englishman’, Thomas also pointed to the enormous gap between what people at home think of a war abroad and the grim reality of what actually goes on. Referring to an earlier history of the great British general, Life and Glorious History of Marlborough, Thomas wrote ‘Then, as now, the soldier on active service and the soldier at home appeared to be two men, not one.’ He went on to refer to the reactions of the people at home:
Such people hear of fights, sieges and many deaths. But they see nothing; the talk leaves a slight and transient impression.
Looking back to the earlier biography he then added ‘They ought…to see the dead horses in the intolerable marshes of a rainy season; they should smell the “stinks of mortality”’
As Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out
Few or none of the poems Thomas had read for his article on ‘War Poetry’ had included such realistic details; even by mid-1915 its focus was largely on the uplifting nature of war and the honour of fighting for England. Though Thomas would choose not to include such grim details in his own poetry, he was ahead of many of his contemporaries in facing the reality of war.
Although his poetry does not deal with the immediacy of trenches and nightmare Thomas revealed time and again how his awareness of history shaped his understanding of the human involvement in the conflict. Only a few days after being passed as fit for enlistment he wrote ‘Digging’ on 21st July 1915:
What matter makes my spade for tears or mirth,
Letting down two clay pipes into the earth?
The one I smoked, the other a soldier
Of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet
Perhaps. The dead man’s immortality
Lies represented lightly with my own,
A yard or two nearer the living air
Than bones of ancients who, amazed to see
Almighty God erect the mastodon,
Once laughed, or wept, in this same light of day.