Tolkien

by Raymond Edwards

  Tolkien returned to Oxford on 16 March for his degree ceremony; whilst he was there, he began a poem, ‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’, dealing respectively with Warwick and Oxford. It was quickly finished, although revised later in the year.32 It begins with barely disguised autobiography: ‘In unknown days my fathers’ sires / Came, and from son to son took root’, although now he is a wanderer between towns. Later texts are written in the person of Eriol the Wanderer, and cast Tolkien’s ancestry in the mode ‘my father was a wandering Anglo-Saxon’. A later draft states baldly ‘There fell my father on a field of blood, / And in a hungry siege my mother died’. In the earliest text, however, the bulk of the poem is a lament over Oxford, deserted in wartime: ‘thy clustered windows each one burn / With lamps and candles of departed men.’ But although ‘war untimely takes thy many sons’, the city itself still shows a melancholy grandeur, and holds a lien on his affection. It is a poem of farewell, of departure. He wrote the first draft over three days; then it was back to Staffordshire, and the Army.

  On 22 March 1916, Tolkien and Edith were married. The wedding was a small affair, in the Catholic church in Warwick; as it was during Lent, the then custom of the Church forbade a full Nuptial Mass. This was certainly not ideal; there is no suggestion, either, that friends and family attended (except, presumably, Jennie Grove). We may attribute some of this, perhaps, to Tolkien’s slightly furtive habit of keeping (male) friendship and emotional life (with Edith) separate one from another, and both from his extended family. Hilary was presumably in France, or otherwise busy, with his regiment; his TCBS cohorts were likewise busy in uniform. Mostly, however, we should probably put it down to the times: the spring of 1916 was, like all times during that war, a time of hurried partings and snatched leave, of hasty embarkations and last lyrical glimpses of familiar places whilst running for a crowded train. It is likely that the Tolkiens were not the only young couple marrying against a military timetable, and Fr Murphy’s diary may have been full. Easter that year was very late – 23 April, about as late as it can fall – and waiting until then might have seemed rash, given the constant uncertainty of impending orders.

  A week after they were married, Tolkien received a publisher’s letter rejecting The Trumpets of Faerie.

  The Tolkiens began their married life in a series of rented houses and lodgings; Edith’s cousin Jennie Grove lived with them during all of this time – Tolkien was busy with Army training and Edith was presumably glad of the company. In April, Edith and Jennie moved to Great Haywood in Staffordshire, to be near the camp where Tolkien was training. Edith struck up a friendship with the Catholic priest of the village, Fr Augustine Emery, who was musical (a violinist) and who, one Sunday, voluntarily celebrated a nuptial blessing for the couple to supply for the one omitted from their Lenten wedding (the congregation, Tolkien wryly observed, probably thought they had been living in sin). Fr Emery kept in touch with the Tolkiens over the coming decades.

  IV – Into battle

  ‘Those who survive can write all that is necessary’33

  On 2 June 1916, Tolkien was ordered to France to join his battalion, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, in preparation for the Somme offensive. He had trained as a signals officer, which allowed him in some small way to use his aptitude for code and language. After forty-eight hours’ embarkation leave (he and Edith went to Birmingham, and spent the night of 3 June at the Plough and Harrow Hotel on the Hagley Road, close by where they first met), he left her and took a train to London, then another to Folkestone. ‘Parting from my wife then … was like a death.’34 On 6 June, he crossed to France. This was only Tolkien’s third trip abroad since his arrival from South Africa in 1895.

  He wrote a poem to England, ‘The Lonely Isle’, on the occasion of his Channel crossing; it is dated ‘Étaples, June 1916’, and is in his best sub-Francis Thompson manner.35 Étaples, a shoreland town in the Pas de Calais amidst sand and pine-trees, was host to a vast British training and transit camp, including the infamous ‘Bull Ring’, a sandy amphitheatre where troops in their thousands were hastily drilled in bayonet technique and other military maneouvres. Tolkien’s kit (camp-bed, sleeping bag, wash-kit), which he had bought at some expense and with care (advised by Smith), was lost in transit; he had to scrounge replacements whilst waiting to be sent up to join his battalion.

  Whilst there, Tolkien wrote another poem, ‘Habannan beneath the Stars’, a vision of a limbo-like twilit region nigh to faërie, where men wait after death, and ‘gather into rings / round their red fires while one voice sings’. It was an image of purgatory, or of some pagan otherworld like that, perhaps, in Virgil; and it was explicitly inspired by his time in military camp in Staffordshire, and later in Étaples. Tolkien felt himself to be amongst the dead, waiting to pass beyond.

  Tolkien’s brother Hilary had enlisted in the Army on the outbreak of war, in the Royal Warwicks. Hilary had left King Edward’s in 1910, aged sixteen, probably without the OTC certificate which would have made him eligible for a commission. As we have seen, he had, after a short stint in an office, gone to work on a farm. He was in France from 1915 to the end of the war, serving as a bugler – which meant, amongst other things, acting as a stretcher-bearer under fire. He was several times wounded, although not seriously; each time, the Army authorities sent a telegram to his designated next-of-kin, who was his sister-in-law, Edith. We can only speculate how she felt.

  Tolkien himself wrote to Edith frequently; they had devised a system, whereby pinholes or dots made in his letters would by some device (perhaps by marking the letters of a place-name) show her his position, which he was forbidden to tell her explicitly. One suspects the censor, had he detected this subterfuge, would have been less than understanding: the location of named bodies of troops was precisely the sort of information sought by enemy agents. Edith had a large map of France pinned to the wall in Great Haywood, and plotted her husband’s movements on it. He also wrote to Fr Vincent Reade, complaining about the Army (years of OTC had presumably stripped any glamour from the routine military life).36

  On 27 June, Tolkien left Étaples by train, with other reinforcements for his battalion and other units at the front. They went slowly through Abbeville, and arrived at Amiens the following day. Then there was a ten-mile march through the cornlands and orchards of Picardy to the village of Rubempré, where he joined his battalion. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, largely recruited from Lancashire miners and weavers, were part of the 74th Brigade, in the 25th Division, II Corps, of the Reserve Army under General Hubert Gough. They were at once set to last-minute training and battle practice. Over half a million men from Kitchener’s New Armies had been assembled for a great assault. In the distance, there was the sound of guns: the five-day-long bombardment of the German lines was coming to its climax.

  On 1 July, the Battle of the Somme began. British attacks on this first day suffered severe losses; of the 120,000 in the initial attack, 60,000 men became casualties, including almost twenty thousand dead. Amongst them was Rob Gilson, killed at the head of his men in no-man’s-land. Gilson had a sister and two younger brothers, aged six and almost four; he had also just got engaged to be married. Both his sister and his fiancée were working as nurses.

  Despite the high casualties, there were considerable successes on the southern half of the front; and as the assault continued on subsequent days, stubborn British attacks slowly pushed the Germans out of their prepared and heavily fortified positions. Over the next weeks and months, in a series of deliberate and generally well-planned attacks, the British Army won a significant if costly victory; the German army was exhausted, all but broken, its commanding general sacked (he had also failed in the long and very bloody assault on Verdun), and early in 1917 was forced to withdraw some miles to an improvised new front line. Little of this was clear to the troops at the front, however.

  Tolkien and most of his battalion were in reserve during the first two weeks’ fighting; two of its four companies, in
cluding Tolkien’s, were in action from 7 July, but Tolkien was by now attached to battalion headquarters and was not with them. He managed to find time to write two poems (‘A Dream of Coming Home’, dedicated to Edith, and ‘A Memory of July in England’). He also saw Smith, whose battalion was stationed in the same village (Bouzincourt) between 6 and 8 July. As an incidental curiosity, the village of Bouzincourt contains a number of man-made tunnels (les muches) used as refuges for men and livestock in cold weather; they were also in frequent use in wartime, especially during the Great War. We might remember the caverns above Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings. Smith and Tolkien met every day, until Smith was sent back to the front.

  On 15 and 16 July, the remainder of Tolkien’s battalion were sent into action. They went over the top at 2.00 a.m. on the 15th, across the muddy corpse-strewn shambles of no-man’s-land, ruined by a fortnight of fighting, towards the enemy trenches; German machine-gun fire broke up the attack, and they retreated to their start-line with heavy casualties. At 1.30 a.m. the following day, the attack was renewed by another unit from their brigade, this time with more success. It is incidentally noteworthy that these attacks took place at the dead of night; this argues a concern to achieve surprise and avoid casualties wholly at odds with the casually accepted notion of the tactical pig-headedness of British generals at this stage in the Great War. That the first assault failed was a function of bad luck rather than stupidity; the high casualty rates in even successful attacks had been an unsurprising feature of siege warfare throughout the ages: and siege warfare, in essence, is what most of the Western Front was. Tolkien’s battalion was in support, and mounted a successful attack later in the day to relieve a battalion that had been surrounded and cut off. As a signals officer, his job was less dangerous than, for instance, leading a platoon into action; but it was by no means a safe post. Casualties amongst all front-line troops were high, and Tolkien was undoubtedly in danger. The day after, 17 July, in the small hours of the morning, the battalion was relieved and marched back to Bouzincourt, which it reached at 6.00 a.m. Only then did Tolkien hear of Gilson’s death, in a letter Smith had written to him two days earlier.

  On 20 July, Tolkien was made Battalion Signals Officer. For the remainder of July and all of August, the battalion was rotated in and out of the front line (at Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers). Periods of front-line duty were occupied mainly with digging and reinforcing trenches, rather than direct assaults across no man’s land; but they were not without danger, and the battalion lost a steady trickle of men to shellfire and snipers.

  Tolkien was now responsible for communications between the battalion and its parent brigade, and also with Divisional headquarters, as well as with neighbouring units. This was no sinecure: breakdowns in communication are one of the most common and destructive causes of military failure, a general truth that was especially apparent in the Great War, where successful assaults required the co-ordination of very large numbers of separate bodies of infantry to a timetable dictated by precisely arranged artillery barrages. In these days before wireless telegraphy, this meant organizing a complex of different means, including runners and carrier pigeons and heliographs, but mostly fixed telephone wires laid through the mud and chaos of the trenches, and frequently cut by barrage or circumstance. The work was unrelenting, filthy and mostly thankless.

  Tolkien and Smith met several times in August, in between front-line duty. They shared their poems with each other; Smith had a long poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’, presumably first written as an entry for the 1914 Newdigate Prize, which was on that subject (he hadn’t won). He had lost the draft of it in transit to France and had rewritten it from scratch.

  They disagreed sharply about the significance of the TCBS now that Gilson was dead. Tolkien’s original view had been that they had, corporately, a mission ‘to rekindle an old light in the world’, something of greater importance even than laying down their lives in a war (as Tolkien believed them to be fighting) of good against evil. But after Gilson’s death, he felt ‘something has gone crack’; he no longer felt part of ‘a little complete body’.37 Smith, in contrast, reckoned the TCBS was ‘an influence on the state of being’ which ‘is not finished and never will be’.38 Between 19 and 22 August Smith’s unit and Tolkien’s were again near each other, and the two of them met daily. Their last meeting, for dinner on the 22nd with Wade-Gery, was interrupted by shellfire. Wade-Gery on this occasion gave Tolkien a copy of Morris’s Earthly Paradise.

  Between the 24th and the 26th, Tolkien was back at the front line near Thiepval, where his battalion was digging new trenches. He wrote two poems – ‘The Thatch of Poppies’ and ‘The Forest Walker’; the second was inspired by a patch of undestroyed woodland he had visited a fortnight before, and alluded to Gilson’s death.39 Tolkien wrote it in the headquarters dugout at Thiepval Wood, now (in contrast) a shattered landscape of burnt and blackened stumps. A few weeks later, another young English poet fought here; he shows us a picture of hell:

  The tired air groans as the heavies swing over, the river-hollows boom;

  The shell-fountains leap from the swamps, and with wildfire and fume

  The shoulder of the chalkdown convulses.

  Then the jabbering echoes stampede in the slatting wood,

  Ember-black the gibbet trees like bones or thorns protrude

  From the poisonous smoke past all impulses.

  To them these silvery dews can never again be dear,

  Nor the blue javelin-flame of the thunderous noons strike fear.40

  The battalion was briefly relieved on the 27th, and spent a day in Bouzincourt resting; then it was back to the front line, this time at Ovillers-La-Boiselle, near the Leipzig Salient (an anomalous British bite out of the German line), for more repair and consolidation work. Constant shellfire here had turned part of yet another wood, Authuille Wood, into a ruin. The battalion was again relieved on 1 September.

  September was spent behind the lines, first on trench repair and reconstruction, then (after a five day route march) in training at Franqueville with the rest of their brigade; Tolkien wrote a poem (‘Consolatrix Afflictorum’) to the Virgin Mary. On the 27th, they returned to the line near Thiepval, where Gough’s Reserve Army was in the middle of a successful attack (known to military history as the Battle of Thiepval Ridge). Thiepval itself, and much of its defensive complex, had just fallen. The next day, 28–29 September, Tolkien’s battalion saw the capture of part of the Schwaben Redoubt (the remaining German strongpoint in the area) and moved up in support to occupy abandoned German positions. They took some prisoners, who turned out to be from a German regiment that had fought beside the Lancashire Fusiliers (then the 20th Foot) in 1759, at their famous feat of arms at Minden (six British battalions and three Hanoverian, in line, drove off repeated attacks by French cavalry), which was celebrated by the regiment every 1 August. Tolkien tried out his German on one of the officers. Carpenter says they were a Saxon regiment,41 which cannot however be right, since the Saxons at Minden were part of the French-Imperial army against which the British were fighting; there were Hanoverian and Hessian regiments alongside the British infantry, so perhaps one of them might be meant. Certainly the German 7th Division had as one of its regiments the 165th (5th Hanoverian) Infanterie, who probably descended from one of the Hanoverian units present on the British side at Minden. The mistake may of course have been Tolkien’s own, or that of the German officer to whom he spoke. If he was a Saxon, then either or both of them had forgot his Seven Years’ War history, since the Saxons, unlike the British, were in that war consistent opponents of Prussia and allies of the French. The apparent coincidence with Tolkien’s own distant ancestry may of course have been too good to overlook.

  On the 30th, the Lancashire Fusiliers were once more relieved. They marched back to Bouzincourt and spent five days training; on 6 October, they returned to the front line to garrison newly captured German positions near Thiepval, opposite the Schwaben Redoubt, parts
of which were still in German hands. For the next two weeks, elements of the battalion rotated in and out of the front line, extending and reinforcing the trenches under shellfire. On the 13th, the whole battalion was moved into the front line. The rest of the Schwaben Redoubt was finally taken on the 14th; now command began planning an assault on the last part of the German fortified complex, known variously as Regina Trench or Stuff Trench (a corruption of the German Staufen Riegel42). On the 16th and 17th, three of the battalion’s four companies were withdrawn to make ready for the attack. Tolkien (perhaps) drew up a map of the respective front-line trenches, marking details of the defences (dugouts, machine-gun posts, gaps in the wire) based on the latest intelligence in the days immediately before the attack. This would have been used to guide the actual assault parties, so accuracy was critical. It is preserved amongst the Tolkien Papers in the Bodleian Library, and is (one suspects) unusually finely drawn and lettered for a trench map: one can see why Tolkien’s commanding officer was eager to keep his services.43

  On the 19th, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers moved up to Hessian Trench, the old German front line, from which they were due to join in the attack. Heavy rain and mist made communications difficult or impossible, and had damaged some of the trenches; so the operation was postponed for forty-eight hours, and the battalion marched back to its staging-post. In the small hours of the 21st, it was again sent forward into Hessian Trench.

  At last, at noon on 21 October, the battalion took part in a successful assault on the German trenches (the Battle of the Ancre Heights), rushing across the few hundred yards of no-man’s-land into Regina Trench in three waves, the first behind a rolling barrage from British artillery. In a bare three-quarters of an hour, they took all their objectives. The battalion lost about 150 men killed and wounded (most in fact caused by men staying too close to the supporting barrage rather than by German fire); Tolkien was unhurt. He was probably at battalion headquarters for the whole operation; as Battalion Signals Officer, he sent news of the success to Divisional headquarters by carrier pigeon. The next day, the battalion was moved behind the lines to rest and refit, before a move to the Ypres sector in Flanders. The day after, the 23rd, they paraded and were inspected first by the Brigadier commanding their brigade, then (after a move by bus) by the Major-General commanding their Division. They then marched to Beauval, where on the 25th they were inspected by General Sir Hubert Gough, Commander of what was soon to become the Fifth Army (the Reserve Army was renamed on 30 October). Lastly, on 26 October, they were inspected and complimented by the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Douglas Haig. But by this time, this ascending panoply of military approbation may have taken on, for Tolkien at least, a surreal quality.