My dear Julian I am sorry I have not written specially to you till I had one to answer and that I have had for a week now. There is not much really to tell you that I can tell you or that it would be permissible or profitable to tell you till it is all over. We are having a dirty long picnic, you know, with many surprising and uncomfortable things in it. Just here we are likely to be dirtier and more uncomfortable than ever before very long, compared with which my cold feet at this moment, and the smell of an oil stove, will be as honey and cream, which by the way I still taste now and then. In fact I never had so many nice things to eat or ate them with less compunction. I hope this does not excite your envy too much. You have had a rotten time with no amelioration, I suspect. I hope it is over and that things are going to pan out not unpleasantly, though they cannot go as you would choose, of course. That goes without saying. I wonder will you find out for yourself some equilibrium in this mix-up, the war and of course everything else. War, of course, is not altogther different from peace, except that one may be blown to bits and have to blow others to bits. Physical discomfort is sometimes so great that it seems a new thing, but of course it is not. You remember cycling in the rain towards Salisbury. It really is seldom quite a different thing than that. Of course, one seems very little one’s own master, but then one seldom does seem so. Death looms, but however it comes it is unexpected, whether from appendicitis or bullet. An alternation of comfort and discomfort is always a man’s lot. So is an alternation of pleasure or happiness or intense interest with tedium or dissatisfaction or misery. I have suffered more from January to March in other years than in this. That is the plain fact. I will not go into it any more. I hope I do not seem to be boasting. I am too often idle and inefficient and afraid to want to boast.
I cannot talk about books. I should have liked to see the Annual. I heard Desmond MacCarthy approved of Eastaway and I wanted to see the said Eastaway in print. Perhaps I shall before very long.
I never see anybody I know. The only man here I can really talk to is most of the time a most confounded nuisance, because he can never play the part of an Artillery Officer but is always a melancholy Scotch philosopher bred mostly in solitude under his mother’s roof. Well, well, what a thing it is, as the old man at Swindon used to say. I should be glad to be back again. Give my love to Maud and the baby and everyone.
P.S. I was just going to tell you not to take too seriously my request for Epsom Salts when the order was given ‘Battery. Action.’ and now we are giving 167 rounds at a hostile battery over there in the dark.
Ever your loving son
Edwy
Index of Letters
To his mother
Beaurains 1 April 1917
Dear Mother, I wrote to Father this morning and hardly mentioned your parcels, because I was tired out. I went to bed directly after but could not sleep. I do not feel so sleepy now. The parcels were very welcome and everything in them... The Epsom salts rather amused me because really I am very well and only feel otherwise when I am bored with a job of doing nothing in one place all day...
The day has kept fine on the whole and if it were a little warmer it would be good Easter weather, fresh, and bright. Only I feel cold after sitting out all night as stout as a market woman with so many clothes on. My servant is washing for me out in the yard and the clothes are blowing on the line just beside the motor car which shines in the sun. The aeroplanes are buzzing overhead and as I sit by an open wood fire it is more like a scene in a small country inn at home than anything else except that one of our guns rattles all the windows every now and then. We get good fires here with the boards and beams of ruined houses all round us. The servants will burn anything if you let them and I have just been lecturing mine on the evil of burning things that still serve the purpose for which they were made. The waste is indescribable. It would be interesting to compare the way the Germans spend their substance. The deep dug-outs they make are far beyond ours in strength and workmanship. We make them just as much as they do but we make wretched things skimped in work and materials so far as I have seen. The thing that is to shelter us in the battle is being made now in a hurry anyhow without any expert advice except that of a thatcher from Norfolk.
I am glad you had some violets. I have not seen any, nor primroses, nor celandines, not even a dandelion... It will be nice to have the kind of Easter weather it is good to sow seeds in. Nice for us, too. Goodbye.
Ever your loving son
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Helen
Arras
l April 1917
Dearest,
Now the night is over I will tell you all about it before I go to bed, if I do go! I feel so cheerful for several reasons of which I will give you two. Firstly, I found a letter from you waiting for me when I returned at 7 a m. Secondly, I found the car waiting for me as soon as I was clear of B., which was most cheering to a tired and overladen officer and four telephonists still more overladen.
Well, I didn’t have much of the fire. I just waited to hear that the working party was only going to carry up the stuff, which they did, and to do the work today or some other time soon. I had to decide to let them carry the heavy stuff (too heavy for them to carry through a sticky trench) along the crest which was being swept by machine guns from time to time. Which they did and luckily came to no harm. I went off to the cellar, leaving two telephonists to take their instrument off the wire and see that the wire on to the cellar was all right. The cellar was full of smoke, except the lowest two feet of it, so that we (the two other telephonists and I) had to crouch or lie. Then shells began to fall in the direction of the O.P. In two hours the other telephonists had not arrived. I thought they had lost their way in the moonlight among the wire and ruins and trenches of B. or had been wounded — or perhaps the working party had had a casualty. So I sent back the other two telephonists to see if they had left the O.P. I had thought myself rather clever — or rather I was very much relieved — to find my way in the moonlight. There was also the complication that I had now been two hours away from the telephone, whereas I am always bound to be on hand. In about an hour the two returned to say the delay was caused by the shelling which had broken down the trench leading to the cellar and that they could not find the wire and that therefore two were staying on at the O.P. with the instrument. I ought to have gone back at once. Instead of which I dozed for one hour or two, dreaming of being court-martialled, till up I got and had a quiet journey. The moon had gone and left all the stars and not a cloud. I was sure of my way by the Plough. But it was dirty and tiring, for I had on vest
shirt
two waistcoats
tunic
one Tommy’s leather waistcoat
British warm
and waterproof.
Only two or three shells came over and I found the telephonists dozing and there in a clay corner we dozed and smoked till daybreak. More heavy shells arrived well away from us. They moan and then savagely stop moaning as they strike the ground with a flap. They are 5.9s or Five Nines as we call them. — I had not been wanted on the telephone so all is well. Day broke clear and white and a lark rose at 5.15. Blackbirds began to sing at 6 and a yellow-hammer. I got up and slopped through the trench and looked at the view over to the Hun, a perfect simple view of three ridges, with a village and line of trees on the first, a clump on the second and clumps and lines on the furthest, all looking almost purple and brown like heather in the dawn. Easter Sunday — a lovely clear high dawn. Then I returned and sat and ate chocolate till the relieving party arrived at 6.30. I had a talk with the officer about the dugout and then off, so glad to be relieved and down through the ghastly street with a mule cart in it waiting for a shell to come over, and at the bottom the other two telephonists from the cellar. Half a mile further on past No Man’s Land and that jagged ruin that I expected to observe from, with a well by it, known as the Burnt House, which now has the first five crosses of a Military Cemetery by it, I saw the
motor car and we all joyrode back here. I washed, shaved and had a slow breakfast after reading your letter. At breakfast I read one from Ivy Ransome, such an artificial one, full of description, as if she thought that was what I should like.
Now everybody has breakfasted. There has been a shower and the sun has returned but among the clouds. I am not very sleepy yet, but just enjoying having nothing to do which is supposed to be the privilege of the day after the O.P. — that is in these peaceful days. You are having a fine Easter, I hope, as we are, though not a warm one yet. I like hearing of your days with Baba and Bronwen and Joy, and of Mervyn’s ride with Ernest, and intended ride to Jesse’s. But here is Rubin saying he gets bored stiff if he is alone. Never mind. I liked hearing about your bath too and your working and the children eating. Rubin has set the gramophone to ‘In Cellar Cool’. But everything, gramophone or not, out here forbids memories such as you have been writing. Memories I have but they are mixed up with my thoughts and feelings in B. or when I hear the blackbirds or when the old dog bangs the table leg with his tail or lies with his brains wasting in his skull. You must not therefore expect me to say anything outright. It is not my way, is it?
Now I must write and remind Mother she has sent only the inessential part of my mapcase, the waterproof cover for it.
A happy Easter! Goodbye
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
Beaurains
2 April 1917
My dear Robert,
I heard that the mails have been lost several times lately at sea. I thought I had better make another shot at you. This is another penultimate letter. Things are closely impending now and will have happened before you get this and you will know all about it then, so I will not try to tell you what they are, especially as I could not get them past the censor.
I have seen some new things since I wrote last and had much and worse things to endure which do not become less terrible in anticipation but are less terrible once I am in the midst of them. Jagged gables at dawn when you are cold and tired out look a thousand times worse from their connection with a certain kind of enemy shell that has made them look like that, so that every time I see them I half think I hear the moan of the approaching and hovering shell and the black grisly flap that it seems to make as it bursts. I see and hear more than I did because changed conditions compel us to go up to the very front among the infantry to do our observation and we spend nights without shelter in the mud chiefly in waiting for morning and the arrival of the relief. It is a 24 hours job and takes more to recover from. But it is far as yet from being unendurable. The unendurable thing was having to climb up the inside of a chimney that was being shelled. I gave up. It was impossible and I knew it. Yet I went up to the beastly place and had 4 shell bursts very close. I decided that I would go back. As a matter of fact I had no light and no information about the method of getting up so that all the screwing up I had given myself would in any case have been futile. It was just another experience like the gamekeeper, — but it was far less on my mind, because the practical result of my failure was nil and I now see far more from the ground level than I could have seen then from 200 feet up the factory chimney.
Otherwise I have done all the things so far asked of me without making any mess and I have mingled satisfaction with dissatisfaction in about the usual proportion, comfort and discomfort. There are so many things to enjoy and if I remember rightly not more to regret than say a year or ten years ago. I think I get surer of some primitive things that one has got to get sure of, about oneself and other people, and I think this is not due simply to being older. In short, I am glad I came out and I think less about return than I thought I should — partly no doubt I inhibit the idea of return. I only think by flashes of the things at home that I used to enjoy and should again. I enjoy many of them out here when the sun shines and at early morning and late afternoon. I doubt if anybody here thinks less of home than I do and yet I doubt if anybody loves it more.
But why should I be explaining myself at such length and not leave you to do the explaining?
We have shifted lately from the edge of a small city out to a still more ruinous village. The planks and beams of the ruins keep us warm in a house that has not had an actual hit except by fragments. We live in comparative comfort, eat luxuriously from parcels sent from London or brought up from places well behind the lines, and sleep dry and warm as a rule. We expect soon to have to live in damp clay pits for safety. There are some random shots but as a rule you know when to expect trouble, and you can feel quite safe close to a place that is clearly dangerous. We work or make others work practically all day with no rests or holidays, but often we have a quiet evening and can talk or write letters or listen to the gramophone playing ‘John Peel’ and worse things far. People are mostly friendly and warm, however uncongenial. I am more than ten years older than 4 of the other 5 officers. They are 19, 20, 25, 26 and 33 years old. Those of 25 and up regard me as very old. I don’t know if the two boys do — I get on better with them: in a sort of way we are fond of one another — I like to see them come in of a night back from some job and I believe they like to see me. What more should anyone want? I revert for 10 minutes every night by reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies in bed with a pipe before I blow the candle out. Otherwise I do nothing that I used to do except eat and sleep: I mean when I am not alone. Funny world. What a thing it is. And I hear nothing of you. Yet you are no more like an American in a book than you were 2½ years ago. You are doing the unchanged things that I cannot or dare not think of except in flashes. I don’t have memories except such as are involved in the impressions as I see or hear things about me. But if I went on writing like this I should make you think I was as damnably introspective as ever and practised the art too. Goodnight to you and Elinor and all. Remember I am in 244 Siege Battery, B.E.F., France and am and shall remain 2nd Lieut. Edward Thomas
Yours ever
Index of Letters
To his mother
5 April 1917
Dear Mother,
We are now in the thick of it, though not quite in the middle. This is the second day, and a beautiful day it is, sunny and misty, the sun sometimes failing behind the mist and coming through again quite warm, which I have enjoyed as I sat out on the bank between No. 3 and No. 4 guns while we fired. Yesterday was cold and slippery and dirty and I got clean tired out by the end when I was relieved at 9.30 p in after beginning at 5.30 a m. I moved into the battery position to a dug-out I have been strengthening, because any day the Hun might see the wisdom of laying our street flat with the ground. It is a little damp in the dug-out but wonderfully quiet except when our No. 1 and No. 2 guns fire straight over it. All the other artillery only makes the air flap heavily all night. It is nice to wake up practically out of doors and hear the wrens in the copse. For the dug-out is dug out of a bank and not down into the ground, so that the light of day reaches it, and it has the advantage of lying across the line of fire of our own and the enemy’s guns, with the entrance not facing either.
I live for the moment in trousers concealed by rubber boots almost to the waist. This shortens the time of dressing and undressing by a quarter of an hour, as I have no boots or breeches to lace up. Otherwise I remain civilised and clean so far.
I have just seen quite a respectable review of the Annual in the Times and I hear there will be one in the New Statesman...
As things are at present arranged I may see exciting things within 3 or 4 days. But of course the future is obscure and we do not know what the Hun will do, or if he is where we think he is — if he is, he is having a bad time. I do not mind how bad if it helps to end the war. Goodbye...
Ever your loving son
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Helen
Beaurains
6 April
1917
There wasn’t a letter... but I will add a little more. — the pace is slackening today.
St
ill not a thrush — but many blackbirds.
My dear, you must not ask me to say much more. I know that you must say much more because you feel much. But I, you see, must not feel anything. I am just as it were tunnelling underground and something sensible in my subconsciousness directs me not to think of the sun. At the end of the tunnel there is the sun. Honestly this is not the result of thinking; it is just an explanation of my state of mind which is really so entirely preoccupied with getting on through the tunnel that you might say I had forgotten there was a sun at either end, before or after this business. This will perhaps induce you to call me inhuman like the newspapers, just because for a time I have had my ears stopped — mind you I have not done it myself — to all but distant echoes of home and friends and England. If I could respond as you would like me to to your feelings I should be unable to go on with this job in ignorance whether it is to last weeks or months or years — I never even think whether it will be weeks or months or years. I don’t even wonder if the drawers in the sitting room are kept locked!
Well, I can’t get my hair cut this morning, so I shall go over to the battery soon and take a turn for Rubin or Thorburn. Smith is up at the O.P. today.
We have such fine moonlight nights now, pale hazy moonlight. Yesterday too we had a coloured sunset lingering in the sky and after that at intervals a bright brassy glare where they were burning waste cartridges. The sky of course winks with broad flashes almost all round at night and the air sags and flaps all night.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 48