Poignant. Smart. Cutting. Exquisite. There are words we use in English to express a beauty so powerful that it carries with it elements of destruction. Now All Roads Lead to France tells a story so delicate, tragic and inevitable, and which contains examples of such searingly perfect poetry, that all I can say is that this is a beautiful book. Read it. Although reading it will both move you and give you pain. The back of my mind is haunted by those dreadful lines of William Shakespeare’s about the wanton gods and flies and killing us for their sport.
It’s a tragedy, the whole thing. Edward Thomas, the son of a civil servant, was born at Lambeth in south London in 1878 of Welsh parentage. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Lincoln College, Oxford, married young and lived pretty much in poverty. He was a writer, journalist and reviewer, doing a dozen or so books a week, hoping to earn enough to support his ambitions to be a poet. But he struggled on, earning a literary reputation and mixing with literary company, before joining up early in the Great War, -serving first with the Artists Rifles, then transferring to the Royal Artillery and was duly killed at the Battle of Arras
in 1917.
This is not the whole story, of course. Something wonderful had happened to him that could have opened an entirely new road for his life to take. He met and became great friends with the young American poet Robert Frost, at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, in 1912. He was now moving in Edwardian literary circles with the likes of Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson, Walter de la Mare, WB Yeats and John Masefield.
He struck up a particular friendship with Frost and the two often went on country walks together. These were of considerable importance to Thomas as a writer. Although undoubtedly safe within the strict definition of the term, he was a Georgian poet, his poetry has a marked and original intensity resulting from the close observation of ordinary things – rough cart ways, rabbit burrows, chalk paths, pewits, stone curlews, wheat ears and buttercups – and the deep flights of fancy, atmosphere and meaning they suggest.
Frost was much taken with the deep thought Thomas gave to the choice of route they would take or not take and the reasons for that choice. These experiences lie at the bottom of Frost’s celebrated and puzzling poem The Road Not Taken. Frost said that you had to be careful in reading this poem because it was “a tricky one”. He confessed it was a dig at Thomas’ fastidious choosiness about his walks through the forest and the way he frequently lamented they had not gone another way. Did this poem contribute to Thomas’ decision to join the infantry and face the dangers on the Western Front rather than head for safety in the United States with his American friend?
The question leads us to Thomas’ unbearably beautiful poem Adlestrop, his reflections at a railway station in Gloucestershire, noted on his way to the front. It’s a poem that sums up all
our Englishness, our nostalgia, our melancholy and our sense of the transience of life.
He remembers the quaint name of the station, the heat of an afternoon in late June, when the express train pulled in and “The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. / No one left and no one came / On the bare platform.” There is no human movement, only the willows, willow-herb, and grass, and meadowsweet, and haycocks, and small clouds in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.”
And there it is on, on the white page, an imperishable moment of Englishness preserved in the aspic of pure and perfect English poetry.
Thomas was at the Battle of Arras. His morning duty was to identify observation posts to survey the placement and conditions of the German lines, about a mile away. But his usual observation of the natural world continued even here: “The shelling must have slaughtered many jackdaws… Chaffinches and partridges, moles working on surface… does a mole ever get shot by a shell?” He was trying hard to hide the English side of his life inside himself for the duration, but letters from home, from Robert Frost and news of his poetry going to press kept it alive as he faced the daily nightmare of life in the first of the modern wars.
As the routine barrage continued, he wrote to his wife on April 7 1917: “Here I am in my valise on the floor of my dugout writing before sleeping. The artillery is like a stormy tide breaking on the shores of the full moon that rides high and clear among the white cirrus clouds… The pretty village among trees that I first saw two weeks ago is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks. But the sun shone and larks and partridges and magpies and hedge sparrows made love and the trench was being made passable for the wounded that will be harvested in a day or two.”
Edward Thomas was killed by a bomb blast on Sunday April 9 1917.
CS Lewis was wounded in the same battle. His commanding officer wrote to his wife Helen: “We buried him in a little military cemetery a few hundred yards from the battery, by his grave the sun came and the guns round seemed to stop firing for a short time.” On the last pages of his war diary, Thomas had written that he’d never understood what was meant by God, adding these lines: “Where any turn may lead to Heaven / Or any corner may hide Hell / Roads shining like river up hill after rain.”
Robert Frost told his widow he wanted to meet him to tell him something. “I want to tell him, what I think he liked to hear from me, that he was a poet.” This book will bring a lump into your throat.
Robet Giddings is the author of The War Poets: The Lives and Writings of the 1914-18 War Poets
