He was crippled by a depression that had afflicted him since university. He worked exhaustedly, hurriedly, "burning my candle at 3 ends", he told Frost, to meet the deadlines of London's literary editors he felt convinced that he amounted to little more than a hack. Thomas had published two dozen prose books and written almost 2,000 reviews, but he had still to write his first poem. Thomas was 36 that summer of 1914, Frost was 40 neither man had yet made his name as a poet.
But this friendship – the most important of either man's life – would falter at a key moment, and Thomas would go to war. He was an anti-nationalist, who despised the jingoism and racism that the press was stoking he refused to hate Germans or grow "hot" with patriotic love for Englishmen, and once said that his real countrymen were the birds. War seemed such an unlikely outcome for him. But Thomas was a man plagued by indecision, and could not readily choose between a life with Frost and the pull of the fighting in France. So close was the friendship that had developed between them that Thomas and Frost planned to live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming. In six months, Frost would flee England for the safety of New Hampshire he would take Thomas's son with him in the expectation that the rest of the Thomas family would follow. They had no idea of the way in which this war would come between them. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county.
E dward Thomas and Robert Frost were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost's cottage in Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany.
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