by C. S. Lewis
I have now almost written my pen out of ink, and—perhaps my reader out of patience: but ‘out of the abundance of the heart’ and as well there will be days when I cannot write much. I have been out once or twice, and can’t say how much longer I shall be here. Write as often and as long (grammar!) as you can.
[Jack was discharged from the hospital on 28 February. He rejoined his battalion at Fampoux. Then after being on the front line of the Battle of Arras 21–24 March he returned to Fampoux, from where he wrote the following letter.]
TO HIS FATHER: from France
[25 March 1918]
I have been living at such a rush since I left hospital that it needed this battle and your probable anxiety to make me write. I am out of the fighting area, but of course we are not enjoying the old peaceful trench warfare I knew before Le Tréport. We have just come back from a four days’ tour in the front line during which I had about as many hours’ sleep: then when we got back to this soi-disant rest, we spent the whole night digging. Under these conditions I know you will excuse me from much letter writing: but I will try and let you know that I am safe from time to time.
[Jack Lewis was among those who were wounded on Mount Bernenchon during the Battle of Arras on 15 April by an English shell which burst behind him. Wyrall records in his History of the Somerset Light Infantry (p. 295): ‘The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L. B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C. S. Lewis, A. G. Rawlence, J. R. Hill and C. S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.’ It is not known whether Lewis learned of the death of his friend Laurence Johnson before he was taken to the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples. On 24 April Warren learned from Mr Lewis that Jack was ‘severely wounded’. Such was his anxiety that he borrowed a bicycle and rode the fifty miles from near Doullens to Etaples to see him. He then had to cycle back to his camp.]
TO HIS FATHER: from the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples
4 May [1918]
Many thanks for the smokes and also for the letter which I was particularly glad to get, as I had not heard from you for so long. I am very sorry—and angry—that you have been through a lot of unnecessary worry and anxiety owing to the carelessness of some fool at the War Office, who—as Arthur informs me—told you some rubbish about my being hit in both arms and in the face. As a matter of fact I was really hit in the back of the left hand, on the left leg from behind and just above the knee, and in the left side just under the arm pit. All three were only flesh wounds. The myth about being hit in the face arose, I imagine, from the fact that I got a lot of dirt in the left eye which was closed up for a few days, but is now alright. I still can’t lie on my side (neither the bad one nor the other one) but otherwise I lead the life of an ordinary mortal and my temperature is alright. So there is no need for any anxiety at all.
TO HIS FATHER: from Etaples
[14 May 1918]
I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case: indeed whatever my condition they would have to send me in that way, because I have no clothes. This is a standing joke out here—the mania which people at the dressing stations have for cutting off a wounded man’s clothes whether there is any need for it or not. In my case the tunic was probably beyond hope, but I admit that I mourn the undeserved fate of my breeches. Unfortunately I was unconscious when the sacrilege took place and could not very well argue the point.
I am doing exceedingly well and can lie on my right side (not of course on my left), which is a great treat after you have been on your back for a few weeks. In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my ‘pidgeon chest’ as shown: this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.
Aunt Lily keeps up a sharp fire of literature—Browning, Emerson, Mill (on ‘the subjection of women’)28 and The Scotsman. How on earth can I be supposed to be interested in The Scotsman? However there are one or two Scotch patients here to whom I hand it over: so I can truthfully tell her that they ‘are read and enjoyed’.29
My friend Mrs Moore is in great trouble—Paddy has been missing for over a month and is almost certainly dead. Of all my own particular set at Keble he has been the first to go, and it is pathetic to remember that he at least was always certain that he would come through.30
TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London (after arriving there on 25 May)
30 May 1918
I hope that you got my telegram and that I will soon hear from you, and not only hear but receive a visit in the aristocratic neighbourhood of Euston. You will be able to come over, will you not, if only for a few days? We must get Kirk up to meet you and have a famous crack. In the meantime, will you please send me my new brown suit, and also, if possible, a pair of black brogue shoes: I ought to have several. It is allowed to wear ordinary clothes here until I can get a uniform made. This is merely a note, as you are already heavily in my debt in the matter of letters . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital
12 June 1918
Thank you for both the letters, as the ‘essay with enclosures’ has followed me here, and indeed arrived shortly after the one I wrote, venturing to suggest that my score of letters was still one up. Peccavi: I most humbly apologise. ‘And you wid a bronchitis in you.’ (By the way it is not a whole shell in me, only a bit of one.) Seriously, I hope that before this you have got over any suggestion of the old trouble: you cannot be too careful in warding it off . . .
I am now up and dressed and have been out a few times: you can well imagine how delightful it is for me to wear decent clothes again—to have pockets without buttons, and to be able to change one’s tie from day to day. I have written to the transport officer of the battalion about my valise, but so far there is no answer: poor man, I expect he has other things to think about than my kit. And—who knows—perhaps even now a Teutonic unter offizier is sleeping in my blankets and improving his English on my bits of books.31 Which reminds me, though the reproach is usually the other way, on the only occasion when we took any prisoners, I was able to talk a little German to their officer, though he could speak no English to me32 . . .
I have since added to my new knowledge of Trollope The Warden and Dr Thorne. Although it may seem strange that Warnie and I both neglect books that are at home and then afterwards read them elsewhere, there is a reason. A book must find you in the right mood, and its mere presence on a shelf will not create that mood, tho’ it lie there for years: as well, when you meet ‘in a strange land’ a book that is associated with home, it has for that very reason an attraction which it would not have at ordinary times. I am now at work, and very much at work on Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, a new Maeterlinck and a new volume of Swinburne. I keep up a very brisk fire of correspondence on Literary and pseudo-scientific subjects with my Aunt Suffern: at this distance she is entertaining, but in a tête à tête ‘no, a thousand times no’ . . .
It is a great pity that you are laid up: there would be points about London for us two—I should like to go with you to the Abbey and the Temple and a few other places. (Just as I am making Arthur green with envy by my accounts of Charing Cross Road, ‘a mile of bookshops’.) On Sunday I am going down to Bookham to see the sage: if only you could make the same pilgrimage! . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital (after visiting Mr W. T. Kirkpatrick)
[20? June 1918]
On Sunday [16 June] I made my pilgrimage. Even to go to Waterloo was an adventure full of memories, and every station that I passed on the way down seemed to clear away another layer of the time that passed and bring me back to the old life. Bookham was as its best: a mass of green, very pleasing t
o one ‘that has been long in city pent’. As I walked up to Gastons the familiar road was crowded with good people coming back from church, and I passed many a stuffy old couple whom I remembered well, though none of them recognised me. It was like being a ghost: I opened the gate of Kirk’s garden almost with stealth and went on past the house, to the vegetable garden and the little wild orchard with the pond, where I had sat so often on hot Sunday afternoons, and practised skating with Terry when the long frost began two years ago. And there among the cabbages, in his shirt and ‘Sunday’ trousers, there sure enough was the old man, still digging and smoking his villainous pipe. His back was towards me and I had come within a few paces of him before he turned and saw me. And so I was led into the house with much triumph and displayed to Mrs K., whom we found fussing with the maid just as of old. I have seldom spent a more delightful afternoon: what ‘crack’ we had, what reminiscences, how often my opinions were shown to be based (‘bazed’ as the sage pronounces it) on an insufficient knowledge of the subject! When I told him that it was by an English shell I was hit, it called forth a magnificent Tirade on the ‘simple mathematical problem’ of calculating how a gun’s range would shorten as it got heated by firing—on the ‘every school boy knows’ lines.
I have bought an edition of Yeats which I ordered the bookseller to send home and which should have arrived by this time.33 Of course I need not add that you are welcome to open the parcel, if you would care to. Arthur at any rate would like to see it, and if you replace the books in their boxes they will be safe from dust and damp until I come home. I hope you do not think it extravagant in me to have bought such a thing, for I knew it was a limited edition which would be very much dearer in a few years’ time. In the same shop where I made this purchase, I’m afraid I gave myself away badly. What first tempted me to go in was a battered copy of Burton’s Anatomy: as you know, I had been looking for this and thought here was an opportunity of picking up a cheap second hand copy. I went in and requested a courtly old gentleman to let me see it. ‘H’m’, said I, glancing over the dirty little volume, ‘it seems rather worn: haven’t you a newer copy?’ The gentleman looked at me in rather a pained way and said that he had not. ‘Well, how much is it?’ I asked, expecting a considerable reduction. ‘Twenty-five guineas’, said my friend with a bland smile. Ye Gods! Just think of it: there was I for the first time in my life fingering a really valuable old edition and asking for a ‘NEWER’ copy. I turned hot all over: and even you as you read, will blush for the credit of the clan. However, the old gentleman was very forgiving: he turned his treasury inside out for me. He showed me priceless old copies of Vergil and Rabelais, books from the Kelmscott Press, including the Chaucer at £82 and strange forgotten waifs of French literature with stiff engravings ‘from the age of snuff boxes and fans’. And so what could I do but bring away the Yeats? Apropos of Beardsley,34 he told me that the ‘fleshly’ artist had often been in that shop and had finally gone the way of all mortal things without paying his account. Well, et ego in Arcadia vixi,35 it is something to have been in the shop of James Bain even for an hour.
It seems that now-a-days one is sent from hospital to be kept for some time in a ‘convalescent home’ before going on leave. Of course I have asked to be sent to an Irish one, but there are only a few of these and they are already crowded: we must not therefore expect too much. But wherever I am I know that you will come and see me. You know I have some difficulty in talking of the greatest things: it is the fault of our generation and of the English schools. But at least you will believe that I was never before so eager to cling to every bit of our old home life and to see you. I know I have often been far from what I should in my relations to you, and have undervalued an affection and a generosity which (as I said somewhere else) an experience of ‘other people’s parents’ has shown me in a new light. But, please God, I shall do better in the future. Come and see me. I am homesick, that is the long and the short of it.
I have been once or twice to the English Opera at Drury Lane and seen among other things my long desired Valkyrie and Faust again—full of reminiscences of course. This week Mrs Moore has been up on a visit to her sister who works at the War Office, and we have seen a good deal of each other. I think it some comfort to her to be with someone who was a friend of Paddy’s and is a link with the Oxford days: she has certainly been a very, very good friend to me . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court, Long Ashton, Clifton, Bristol (after his arrival there on 25 June)
[29 June 1918]
Surely this is the most unfortunate thing that ever happened to us! I was prepared to be disappointed in my efforts to be sent to an Irish convalescent home, but this is the very acme of ill luck. When they finally told me in London that I could not go to Ireland, they asked me to choose some part of England: at first I said London, thinking that this would be more convenient for you than any provincial town, but this could not be done. I then elected Bristol, where I could have the society of Mrs Moore, and also of Perrett of the Somersets, whose being wounded some days before myself I mentioned to you.36 Little could I foresee what was going to happen: we are still close prisoners . . .
All the ‘gilded youth’ among the patients, who have no interests in themselves, of course grow more troublesome being confined. The place echoes to the crack of their billiard balls and their loud, tuneless whistling: I was very miserable for the first few days until I discovered a little, almost disused writing room at one end of the house. Here I can sit in comparative safety and read Burton’s anatomy which I have had sent from town.37
If I should happen to get the disease I suppose all my bits of things will be burned. I could sit down and cry over the whole business: and yet of course we have both much to be thankful for. When a man can sleep between sheets as long as he will, sit in arm chairs, and have no fears, it is peevish to complain. If I had not been wounded when I was, I should have gone through a terrible time. Nearly all my friends in the Battalion are gone.
Did I ever mention Johnson who was a scholar of Queens? I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there. Dis aliter visum, he is dead.38 I had had him so often in my thoughts, had so often hit on some new point in one of our arguments, and made a note of things in my reading to tell him when we met again, that I can hardly believe he is dead. Don’t you find it particularly hard to realise the death of people whose strong personality makes them particularly alive: with the ordinary sons of Belial who eat and drink and are merry, it is not so hard.
But I must not enlarge on a melancholy subject: I have no doubt that we are all three of us pretty low. However, ‘better luck next time’: this cannot last for ever and I hope yet to have a visit from you. As for my own health it is pretty good, although the wound in the leg—the smallest of the three—is still giving some trouble.
The house here is the survival, tho’ altered by continual rebuilding, of a thirteenth-century castle: the greater part is now stucco work of the worst Victorian period (à la Norwood Towers) but we have one or two fine old paintings and a ghost. I haven’t met it yet and have not much hope to—indeed if poor Johnson’s ghost would come walking into the lonely writing room this minute, I should be glad enough. Greatly to my chagrin the library is locked up. The park is several miles in extent, very pleasant and stocked with deer: once or twice while wandering in the bracken I have suddenly come upon the solemn face and branching antlers of a stag, within a few feet of me. He examines me for a moment, then snorts, kicks up his heels, and is gone: a second later, head after head comes up—his panic has reached the rest of the herd, and they too scamper off after him like the wind.
A most generous and welcome consignment of smokeables came this morning. Communication with the town is scanty now of course, and this is a most welcome addition to our diminishing stocks: what is more, such little attentions are infinitely cheering when one is dull, lonely and disappointed . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court
[29? July 1918]
You can imagine how mystified I was by an envelope from the U.V.F.—the contents too were unexpected.39 In some ways this scheme has given me to think: you see the Board which sate upon me in London gave me two months convalescence which will be finished on the 24th of August. It appears however in this hospital, if you are quiet and inoffensive and keep yourself well out of the notice of the authorities, you may be often left for several weeks after your time. The great danger about this change would be that of getting the reply ‘If you are so anxious to move, we will have you boarded at once and discharged from hospital.’ Such a procedure would of course hasten my return to France. The amount of leave I get after hospital (whatever it may be) will not be influenced by the time which I have spent in the former, and it is therefore to our interest to prolong the hospital period to the utmost. The smaller Irish hospitals are notoriously strict and up to time with their Boards. I must admit too, I should be sorry to give up the idea of your coming to visit me here: it would give me great pleasure for you to meet Mrs Moore, and I feel that this visit to me is the only excuse on which you will ever get away for a while from Belfast and the office. If you were at the office all day and I had to be back at the hospital at 6 or 7 every night, it would be hardly worth while coming to a hospital at home. Here we could have a delightful little holiday together . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court
3 September 1918
Ever since my last letter to you I have been almost daily expecting to hear from you, and I am rather surprised that neither my answer to your proposal nor my suggestion that you should come over here has met with any reply. Have you not yet decided on a date for coming over? It is four months now since I returned from France, and my friends laughingly suggest that ‘my father in Ireland’ of whom they hear is a mythical creation like Mrs Harris.40