A Welsh soldier who was killed during the First World War became a muse for some of the celebrated war poets. Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves counted him as a friend and his death would go on to inspire some of their greatest poems.
David Cuthbert Thomas was just 20 years old when he was shot in the throat by a sniper near Fricourt at the Somme on March 18, 1916. He managed to walk to a first aid post but succumbed to his injuries after choking on his blood.
His fate was shared by thousands of young men and boys who list their life in such violence during the Great War. But not all would be eulogised by some of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
David Cuthbert Thomas
Thomas was born in Pontarddulais, in what was then Glamorgan, and was educated at the public school Christ College in Brecon. Upon leaving education he became a second lieutenant in the third battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers – the regiment in which he met both Sassoon and Graves.
A skilled soldier, Thomas would go on to be posted to the regiment’s first battalion and was sent to the Western Front. On the day of his death he was leading a working party to repair barbed wire lines in no man’s land. He is buried at the New Military Cemetery at Fricourt.
Siegfried Sassoon
Following his death Graves dedicated a number of poems to Thomas including Not Dead. The opening lines reference his fallen friend: “Walking through trees to cool my heat and pain, I know that David’s with me here again.”
Graves, who went on to write the I, Claudius historical novels, also dedicated his poem Goliath and David (for D.C.T, killed at Fricourt, March, 1916) in which he refers to Thomas’ death. It reads: “One cruel backhand sabre-cut, ‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries, Throws blindly forward, chokes… and dies. And look, spike helmeted, grey, grim, Goliath straddles over him.”
Robert Graves
Sassoon was especially affected by Thomas’ death and wrote the day afterwards: “Tonight I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth – Robert Graves beside me with his white whimsical face twisted and grieving. Once we could not hear the solemn words for the noise of a machine-gun along the line; and when all was finished a canister fell a hundred yards away and burst with a crash.
“So Tommy left us, a gentle soldier, perfect and without stain. And so he will remain in my heart, fresh and happy and brave.”
David Cuthbert Thomas (front row far right) in a rugby team picture from his old school Christ College Brecon
He also dedicated the poem Enemies to Thomas. It reads: “He stood alone in some queer sunless place/Where Armageddon ends. Perhaps he longed/For days he might have lived; but his young face/Gazed forth untroubled: and suddenly there thronged/Round him the hulking Germans that I shot/When for his death my brooding rage was hot.”
David Cuthbert Thomas (top row far left, next to vicar) in a hockey team picture from Christ College Brecon
Thomas would appear in both respected poets’ autobiographies, Graves’ Good-Bye to All That and Sassoon’s Sherston Trilogy where Thomas was fictionalised as ‘Dick Tiltwood’. In Good-Bye to All That Graves wrote: “I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been in France, but it did not anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every evening now, when he came up with the rations, went out on patrol looking for Germans to kill. I just felt empty and lost.”
David Cuthbert Thomas
Nearly a century after his death lost photos of Thomas were discovered by his alma mater, Christ College, Brecon, in 2014. They show him as a carefree young man just months before the outbreak of war posing with his cricket, hockey, and rugby teams.
Writing about his friend in happier times Sassoon described Thomas as a cricketer in the poem A Subaltern. It read: “He turned to me with his kind, sleepy gaze/And fresh face slowly brightening to the grin/That sets my memory back to summer days/With twenty runs to make, and last man in.”