For king and countryside

In July 1915 the poet Edward Thomas enlisted as a soldier with the Artists’ Rifles, even though, at the age of 37, he had no obligation to do so. When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked why, he scooped up a handful of earth and replied: ‘Literally, for this.’ John Lewis-Stempel’s new book is persuasive that Thomas and his contemporaries’ love of the natural world informed both their motivation to fight and their conduct during the first world war.

Theirs was the prelapsarian Britain of Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’, which records a brief, unscheduled halt aboard a steam train on a hot June afternoon in 1914: peaceful, inviolate, chiming with birdsong, loved and understood by a generation of young men who knew willowherb from meadowsweet. Thomas ‘died at Arras for Adlestrop’, Lewis-Stempel contends, as did countless others who likewise fought ‘for King and Countryside’, in defence of the pastoral realm that the poem evokes. Lewis-Stempel illustrates his case with verse throughout, not from those such as Wilfred Owen who were ‘canonised for their “correct” politics, meaning anti-war’, but from a bevy of the war’s minor poets, whose work he knows well.

British soldiers brought to the battlefronts of rural France and Belgium a pre-existing love of nature, he argues. Whether they hailed from the countryside or the city, these were men for whom proximity with animal life felt normal. Rural Edwardian children kept bees, collected birds’ eggs and pinned butterflies. London’s roads were congested with horse-drawn carriages and its trees and bushes thronged with birds; the capital’s sparrow population has, we are told, since declined by 99 per cent. The Great War occupies a historic cusp, Lewis-Stempel says: it opened an age of industrial slaughter, but remained a time when people engaged with nature in a way we no longer do today.