by John Garth
On Sunday afternoon the friends repaired to Marston Green and then went their separate ways. By a quirk of military organization, when Gilson rejoined his battalion on Salisbury Plain a week later, disorientated and unhappy, he found his unit on the point of moving to the village of Sutton Veny, a mere five miles up the Wylye Valley from Codford St Mary, where Smith was. A rainy weekend together shopping and eating cheered him immensely. They went to Salisbury and then to the pretty village of Westbury, which, to their great pleasure, was ‘almost without soldiers’. Gilson wrote home:
The rain stopped just as we got there and the evening was beautiful. We walked up on to the top of the bastions of the Plain, and sat down with a wonderful view all around us – greys and dull blues and greens, with wet trees down in the valley all blurred and misty. I drew a little picture of a copse – a thin line of blue trees with a black group of buildings behind it, and the thin straight trunks making a lovely pattern against the sky in the darkening light. G. B. Smith wrote a poem about it some time ago, the one thing I believe of his which is being printed in Oxford Poetry 1915, so I gave him the drawing. He read Herrick to me while I drew, and we got miles away from the war.
Smith’s poem about the copse was ‘Songs on the Downs’, a reflection on the Roman road crossing the Plain upon which ‘The years have fallen like dead leaves, / Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed…’ Smith’s mood was febrile and fretful, and, reflecting on his imminent coming of age, he wrote darkly to Tolkien: ‘The steps I have taken in the direction of growing up have been simply steps farther away from my blessed days at school, and towards the absolutely unknown, whether it be a business career or a shattered skull.’
He and Gilson laid plans for a TCBS meeting in Bath, a short train ride from the Salisbury Plain camps. They reconnoitred the town as Smith intoned comments in long ‘Gibbonian periods’, revelling in its eighteenth-century heritage and anticipating the pleasures of a gathering there of the four. Smith, for one, lurched feverishly towards such oases. ‘I feel that we shall inevitably enact scenes from The Rivals at every street-corner,’ he declared. Meanwhile he wanted Tolkien to send copies of his recent poems to show Captain Wade-Gery, the former classics don now in the Salford Pals. Gilson and Smith plotted Tolkien’s literary future and urged him to get his poetry off to a publisher such as Hodder & Stoughton or Sidgwick & Jackson.
Tolkien’s life was far removed from this kind of companionship, and around the middle of October his battalion moved again, leaving Lichfield for the broad, windswept upland of Cannock Chase, north of Birmingham. The Earl of Lichfield had granted the army use of the Chase, which he owned, at the outbreak of war. In those days, before it was furred over with forestry plantations, it was almost treeless, with a raw, desolate beauty. But a vast, unbeautiful military complex had been grafted on to the face of the heath where the Sher Brook ran off it northwards. On the shallow banks of the stream the army had established Rugeley Camp and its neighbour Brocton Camp, together big enough to process 40,000 men at a time. Grim barrack huts were arranged in straight parallel lines around a complex of parade grounds, above which loomed a square water-tower and a power station whose four chimneys pumped smoke into the sky. German prisoners were held behind wire, watched from guard towers. Hogsbacks of gravel lounged on the surrounding heath, the stop-ends of rifle ranges. Construction work was still in progress when Tolkien’s battalion arrived, and it went on until February.
The battalions of the 3rd Reserve Brigade trained here in musketry, scouting, physical training, gas warfare, and other disciplines, including signalling. Concerts and gatherings in cramped YMCA huts provided some social life for the rank-and-file soldiers, but escape was sought as often as possible in the pubs of villages around the Chase; boredom and drink, however, proved an inevitably fractious brew, and discipline was enforced with extra drills and fatigues, or confinement to the guardroom. The winter barracks were bitter with coke fumes and tobacco smoke, mingling oppressively with the smell of boot polish, sweat, beer, rifle-oil, and wet floors.
As a subaltern with the brigade Officers’ Company, Tolkien was much better off. In Penkridge Camp, he shared a small officers’ hut heated by a stove. Off duty, he could try to close his ears to the sound of marching boots, barked orders, bugles, rifle-fire, and the constant wind in order to work on his expanding Qenya lexicon or his ever more ambitious writings. But during the day there was no escape from the cold, wet weather of the Chase. This was a dark period for Tolkien. ‘These grey days wasted in wearily going over, over and over again, the dreary topics, the dull backwaters of the art of killing, are not enjoyable,’ he wrote. A typical day was physically unpleasant and mentally enervating:
The usual kind of morning standing about freezing and then trotting to get warmer so as to freeze again. We ended up by an hour’s bomb-throwing with dummies. Lunch and a freezing afternoon…we stand in icy groups in the open being talked at! Tea and another scramble – I fought for a place at the stove and made a piece of toast on the end of a knife: what days!
Meanwhile Tolkien had evidently failed to achieve a transfer to Smith’s battalion, or had given up trying. Edith was unwell and in Warwick. The war filled him with fear for his friends and for England itself.
The Council of Bath did not take place. On impulse, Smith and Gilson took the train to see Wiseman in London because Tolkien could not make it. Gilson wrote: ‘I never before felt quite so keenly the four-squareness of the TCBS. Take one away and it is like cutting a quarter of the canvas from the Granduca Madonna.’ They watched Pinero’s The Big Drum enjoyably, though only Wiseman actually liked it. ‘I laughed a little, generally at the right places,’ he wrote, ‘while Rob and GBS laughed at the wrong places, being of superior dramatic insight.’
Smith and Gilson had sat up late with Wiseman at his Wandsworth home, bemoaning the state of modern theatre. London was full of libidinous soldiers home from the Western Front looking for a ‘bit of fun’ and leaving ‘war babies’ in their wake. The Routh Road conclave blamed George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen for doing away with Victorian prudery but putting nothing in its place to prevent moral freefall. Gilson proposed that feminism would help by banishing the view that ‘woman was just an apparatus for man’s pleasure’. But they pinned their real reformist hopes on the TCBS itself.
Smith declared that, through art, the four would have to leave the world better than they had found it. Their role would be ‘to drive from life, letters, the stage and society that dabbling in and hankering after the unpleasant sides and incidents in life and nature which have captured the larger and worser tastes in Oxford, London and the world…to re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everyone’s breast.’ Smith wrote to Tolkien the next day: ‘It struck me last night that you might write a fearfully good romantic drama, with as much of the “supernatural” as you cared to introduce. Have you ever thought of it?’
None of these young idealists seems to have baulked at the vast evangelizing task they were setting themselves. Gilson told Tolkien that, sitting in Routh Road, where the inspiration of last year’s Council of London hung over them, ‘I suddenly saw the TCBS in a blaze of light as a great moral reformer…England purified of its loathsome insidious disease by the TCBS spirit. It is an enormous task and we shall not see it accomplished in our lifetime.’ Wiseman, who was very modest about his own artistic abilities, was slightly more reserved. ‘You and GBS have been given your weapon early and are sharpening it,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t know what mine is, but you shall see it one day. I am not going to be content with a Civil Commission in the TCBS.’ Meanwhile there was the real war to face. If Germany conquered, Wiseman declared, drawing on old school memories for a burst of boyish pluck, ‘The TCBS stays in old England and fights the fight as begun in the Richards’ matches.’
Despite the crusading language, the TCBSian cultural and moral manifesto did not involve telling people what to do. This is clear from what both Smith and Tolkien were writ
ing. Smith’s poetry had always displayed a misanthropic hunger for solitudes of wind and sea; now it occasionally exulted in war as a purgative to wash away the old and stale, revealing a new, better world. Its most biting criticism was aimed at the confident, golf-playing ‘sons of culture’ and their ‘polite laughter’, a class-diatribe against the likes of T. K. Barnsley and Sidney Barrowclough, perhaps. Fundamentally, however, what Smith expressed in his poetry was a desire to escape from society, rather than to change it. Tolkien’s poems were even less didactic and morally charged, yet Smith was full of praise for the batch he received just before the Routh Road meeting. ‘I have never read anything in the least like them,’ he wrote back, ‘and certainly nothing better than the best. “The Happy Mariners” is a magnificent effort.’ If this was the glint of weaponry in the war on decadence, then the TCBSian strategy was indirect, to say the least: inspirational, rather than confrontational.
The Great War was a time of enormous upheaval, when old orders were indeed thrust aside; the desire for a newer, better world was everywhere and took many forms. For the revolutionaries now plotting the downfall of Tsarist Russia, new meant new. For Tolkien, Smith, and Gilson (none of whom shared much of Wiseman’s progressive, scientific liberalism), new meant a variety of old. Each had his personal, nostalgic Parnassus: the Anglo-Saxon period, the eighteenth century, the Italian Renaissance. None of these eras had been utopian, but distance lent them a glittering clarity. The twentieth century seemed a fogbound wilderness in comparison, and now civilization truly seemed to have lost its way. It may be that Tolkien was expressing this sentiment in ‘The Happy Mariners’, which yearns towards a different time and place, the immortal West.
But this was not the escapist urge it appears at first glance. The West of Tolkien’s imagination was the heartland of a revolution of sorts: a cultural and spiritual revolution. Like so many of his major ideas, this thought seems to have appeared first in his early lexicon of Qenya. There he had written that it was from Kôr, west over the ocean, that ‘the fairies came to teach men song and holiness’. Song and holiness: the fairies had the same method and mission as the TCBS.
‘Kortirion among the Trees’, a long November 1915 poem and Tolkien’s most ambitious work so far, laments the fairies’ decline. The Qenya lexicon calls Kortirion ‘the new capital of the Fairies after their retreat from the hostile world to the Tol Eressëa’: to the ‘Lonely Isle’, implicitly the island of Britain. Aryador might have borrowed from Whittington Heath a few topographical features, but Kortirion is Warwick, in a mythic prehistory: ‘the city of the Land of Elms, / Alalminórë in the Faery Realms’, and Alalminórë is glossed ‘Warwickshire’ in the Qenya lexicon. However, the lexicon tells us that Kortirion was named after Kôr, the city from which the Elves came over the western sea on their mission into ‘the hostile world’. So Tolkien’s Elvish history presents a double decline, first from Kôr across the sea to Kortirion, then from Kortirion down the years to Warwick.
This provided an elegant ‘explanation’ for the presence in fairy-tale tradition of two apparently contradictory versions of Faërie. The Canterbury Tales mentions both. Chaucer’s Merchant depicts Pluto and Proserpine as the king and queen of fairyland, which is therefore a land of the dead; and here Chaucer was tapping into a tradition in which Faërie is an Otherworld like the Arthurian Avalon, the Welsh Annwn, or the Irish land of eternal youth, Tír na nÓg. However, the Wife of Bath recalls that, in King Arthur’s day, all Britain was ‘fulfild of fayerye’ and the elf-queen danced in many a meadow; yet now, she says, ‘kan no man se none elves mo’; so now Chaucer was drawing on the rival tradition, of a fairyland that once flourished openly in our own mortal world but had since faded from general view. Tolkien’s idea was that each of the two traditions could represent a different stage in Elvish history. When Elves dwelt openly here in mortal lands they (or some of them at least) were exiles from an Otherworld Faërie cut off by perilous enchanted seas.
The double decline in Tolkien’s Elvish history is matched by two levels of nostalgia. Of Kôr the original and splendid, now empty, Kortirion was merely a consolatory memorial built in defeat. Of Kortirion, modern Warwick knows next to nothing:
O fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,
Thy robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still; The castle only, frowning, ever waits
And ponders how among the towering elms
The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms And slips between long meadows to the western sea –
Still bearing downward over murmurous falls One year and then another to the sea;
And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion.
The lengthy ‘Kortirion’ gave Tolkien room to make the most of his imagery. Trees yield some extraordinary extended metaphors: trunks and foliage are seen as masts and canvas on ships sailing off to other shores, and the wind-loosed leaves of autumn are likened to bird wings:
Then their hour is done,
And wanly borne on wings of amber pale
They beat the wide airs of the fading vale And fly like birds across the misty meres.
The image anticipates Galadriel’s song of farewell in The Lord of the Rings: ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!’ The Ents of Fangorn Forest are a long way off, but already in ‘Kortirion’ tree and leaf are far more than objects of beauty: they count the seasons, they sail or soar away, they entangle the stars.
In this 1915 poem, Tolkien struck the first note of the mood that underpins his entire legendarium: a wistful nostalgia for a world slipping away. The spring and summer represent the lost past when Elves walked England openly. Winter is the harbinger of mortality:
Strange sad October robes her dewy furze
In netted sheen of gold-shot gossamers,
And then the wide-umbraged elm begins to fail;
Her mourning multitudes of leaves go pale
Seeing afar the icy shears
Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears
Marching unconquerable upon the sun
Of bright All-Hallows.
More immediate concerns, perhaps, also register in Tolkien’s poem. The summer to which ‘Kortirion’ looks back may be seen as a symbol of both childhood and the pre-war past, and winter, with his on-coming army, as the uniquely lethal future allotted to Tolkien’s generation.
However that may be, the poem confesses that autumn/winter ‘is the season dearest to my heart, / Most fitting to the little faded town’. This seems a paradox, but ‘fitness’, the accord of symbol and meaning, was essential to Tolkien’s aesthetics, as can be seen from the careful matching of sound to sense in his invented languages. Another young soldier-poet, Robert Graves, said during the Great War that he could not write about ‘England in June attire’ when ‘Cherries are out of season, / Ice grips at branch and root’. But ‘Kortirion’ actually discovers beauty in the way the autumn embodies the evanescence of youth or elfinesse.
The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a ‘wistful song of things that were, and could be yet’. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in ‘Kortirion’ but an acceptance approaching contentment.
The mood is most apparent in the poem’s sense of rootedness. In contrast to Éarendel or the envious figure in ‘The Happy Mariners’, the voice hymning Kortirion concludes that it has no desire for adventure:
I need not know the desert or red palaces Where dwells the sun, the great seas or the magic isles,
The pinewoods piled on mountain-terraces…
The sentiment is central to Tolkien’s character. Later, when he had put the years of enforced wandering behind him, he rarely travelled far except in his imagination. It was landscape and climate more than political statehood that fired his idea of nationalism. The spirit of
place, so potent in Tolkien’s mythology, seems to have emerged fully fledged just as the subaltern poet was swept into a life outdoors and on the move: his eye was sharpened, but so was his longing for home, which Warwick had come to embody. Stray workings for this latest poem (relating to the army of winter) suggest that he may have begun the poem shortly after arriving at Penkridge Camp, with its grey waste, its boredom and its grind. But Tolkien created the Elf-haunted town of Kortirion from life when, following army inoculations, he spent a week of frost and clear skies with Edith in Warwick. On his return to camp, he sent her a copy of the poem and then wrote out another, despatching it at the end of November to Rob Gilson for circulation among the TCBS.
‘I am now 21 years of age, and cannot help doubting whether I shall ever be 22,’ G. B. Smith had written from Salisbury Plain in mid-October. ‘Our departure for France is almost within sight. The King is going to inspect us shortly. I hope he will be duly impressed by this member of the TCBS.’ The Salford Pals were waiting to move out along with eleven other battalions, including Ralph Payton’s and Hilary Tolkien’s, all of which belonged to a single vast army division encamped around Codford St Mary. In November, Smith worked hard to finish a long poem of his own, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’, before embarkation. He rushed home to West Bromwich to say goodbye to his widowed mother and dined at Codford for the last time with Gilson, who wrote: ‘It is impossible for us to tell him all the hopes and wishes and prayers that the first TCBSite to set forth carries with him…I feel that this is a memorable day in TCBSian history.’