A widow’s grief and the myth of Great War poet’s ‘ bloodless death’
THE death of the great First World War poet Edward Thomas on the first day of the Battle of Arras was sanitised to spare his widow, a newly discovered letter shows.
Until now, the poetic genius who inspired some of English literature’s greatest writers, including Thomas Hardy and WH Auden, was thought to have died without a wound on his body.
Arras claimed almost 160,000 British casualties, and the extraordinary death of a poet once described by Ted Hughes as the ‘father of us all’ became
‘He was shot clean through the chest’
the stuff of legend – a shell blast stopping his heart and, poignantly, his watch, on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917. He was 39.
But that myth has been dispelled with the discovery of a letter from his commanding officer, Franklin Lushington, which shows he was ‘shot clean through the chest’.
The letter has been unearthed by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, an authority on First World War poets, whose biography – Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras – will be published by Bloomsbury on Thursday.
She told the Daily Mail the letter is ‘very exciting’, as generations of biographers have only repeated the myth surrounding his death.
‘When they gave the last Imperial War Museum exhibition, they had the watch and the story that he died without a blemish beside it,’ she said.
Having unearthed the letter in a US archive, she believes the myth was perpetuated by Thomas’s widow, Helen, who suffered a breakdown over her loss. After a visit from Lushington, she wrote to a friend: ‘He told me there was no wound and his beloved body was not injured.’
Miss Moorcroft Wilson said the myth of Thomas’s death has overshadowed the ‘real miracle’ of his life – his writing, equal to that of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke.