Philip Zelikow - The Road Less Traveled

E DWARD T HOMAS COULD NOT decide what to do. An emerging poet, Thomas, thirty-seven years old in the summer of 1915, was balancing his time between literary London and the home he loved in the beautiful Hampshire countryside of southern England. Married, with children, he had not yet been conscripted into the war that was already taking so many of his countrys young men.

Thomas was torn. Should he enlist, join the war, and serve his country at the front? Or should he leave it all far behind and go to America?

Thomas had a real offer of refuge in America. His friend and soulmate, a fellow poet named Robert Frost, had gone back to his beloved farmlands of New Hampshire. Come join me, Frost had offered.

Frost and Thomas had become friends when Frost had moved to England in 1912, hoping that there he might make an impression with his work. Over many visits together, the two men had encouraged each others writing, each others dreams. They often took long walks through the woods, relishing the outdoors. Thomas and I had become so inseparable, Frost recalled, that we came to be looked on as some sort of literary Siamese twins.

Earlier in 1915, Frost and his wife, Elinor, had returned to America. With them, Edward Thomas sent his eldest child, his fifteen-year-old son. Thomas had an open invitation to come along too.

So, now, Thomas faced his choice: Should he join up and go to war or seek peace with his American friend? Thomas had often talked to Frost

Frost replied by sending his friend a draft poem. He called it The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Thomas took the message of the poem very personally. He was hurt by it. He felt Frost was accusing him of dithering and that the accusation was unfair. Its all very well for you poets in a yellow wood to say you choose, but you dont.

Frost wrote back, assuring his friend that he was only teasing: Methinks you strikest too hard in so small a matter. the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing.

Thomas was unconvinced. You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake.

A week later, he wrote to Frost to say that now his mind was made up. Last week I had screwed myself up to the point of believing I should come out to America & lecture if anyone wanted me to. But I have altered my mind. I am going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me.

The doctor did pass him. After training, Thomas reported for duty to become an officer in the Royal Artillery. The date was August 25, 1916.

When Thomas took on his commission, the Great War had been under way for two years. The summer of 1916 had been the most monstrous yet. Already that seasons gigantic concussions had passed into the common vocabulary; one needed only to say Verdun or the Somme. No one in Europe had ever lived through such a war. It had passed well beyond any known experience.

Earlier, in 1916, Thomas wrote a poem that closed with the words

Now all roads lead to France

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance.

If they danced lightly in memory, the collective tread of the lost millions was heavy enough in the consciousness of the living. By August 1916, with no end to it in sight, all the leaders of the warring powers, at least in private, confronted the scale and cost of the slaughter, the unremitting hardship weighing on their societies.

Like Edward Thomas, the leaders also faced a fateful choice. They too looked out at two divergent roads. Down one path was ever more war. The other, perhaps, led to peace.

As they looked down the war path, no good military options were left. Money, food, munitions, and people were running short.

Yet the road to peace seemed daunting too. How to get there? How to take the first steps?

Exhausted nations, drummed onward by patriotic duty, sought meaning from their appalling sacrifices. Bureaucrats wrote papers speculating about annexing this or that strip of land. But to some of the leaders, on both sides, such aims seemed banal, almost trivial, in relation to the scale of what was being sacrificed. Was anything, beyond defense of home and country, worth all this? Yet, if they had doubts, how could they acknowledge them? What could they say? How could they be the first to go before their suffering people and offer to end the war without a heroic conclusion?