Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  To Estelle King, Gilson confided his sympathy for Tolkien’s lot, explaining that his friend had lost both parents and had ‘always had something of a wanderer’s life’. Tolkien was contemplating that same fact when he returned to Oxford for his long-delayed degree ceremony on Thursday 16 March 1916. That day he started a long new poem, continuing it when he returned to Warwick: ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’. Correspondence aside, it is the most overtly personal of Tolkien’s published writings. The mythology was in abeyance. It is perhaps no coincidence that Tolkien experimented in this more conventional direction in the midst of his argument with Wiseman about the ‘freakishness’ of his other poetry.

  A prelude depicts an unidentified landscape of orchard, mead, and grassland settled by ‘my father’s sires’; which, if Wiseman read it right, is to be taken literally as a description of Tolkien’s paternal ancestors in ancient Germania.

  There daffodils among the ordered trees

  Did nod in spring, and men laughed deep and long

  Singing as they laboured happy lays

  And lighting even with a drinking-song.

  There sleep came easy for the drone of bees

  Thronging about cottage gardens heaped with flowers;

  In love of sunlit goodliness of days

  There richly flowed their lives in settled hours…

  But Tolkien’s roots in Saxony lie in the remote past, and he is an ‘unsettled wanderer’ in Britain, where the scene shifts to Warwick and Oxford.

  In Warwick’s fourteenth-century keep, the Norman earls lie as if in a blissful reverie, silently rebuked by the passing seasons.

  No watchfulness disturbs their splendid dream,

  Though laughing radiance dance down the stream;

  And be they clad in snow or lashed by windy rains,

  Or may March whirl the dust about the winding lanes,

  The Elm robe and disrobe her of a million leaves

  Like moments clustered in a crowded year,

  Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves,

  Uncomprehending of this evil tide,

  Today’s great sadness, or Tomorrow’s fear:

  Faint echoes fade within their drowsy halls

  Like ghosts; the daylight creeps across their walls.

  ‘Tomorrow’ here is not just age, as it had been in ‘You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play’, but the dreadful prospect of battle that Tolkien and his peers faced. Against this terrible upheaval, the ‘old lords too long in slumber lain’ represent a deceptive continuity, an inertia that rolls unheeding through the changing years. They are complacent, unadaptable, and incapable of vigilance. We may catch a hint of the anger shared by many of Tolkien’s generation, whose world seemed to have been consigned to disaster by the negligence of their elders.

  But if so, Tolkien was conscious that he too had been dreaming. ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ takes a distinctly different view from ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, in which he had proclaimed his sense of ‘ever-near content’ in Warwick. For in his new poem he wrote:

  Here many days once gently past me crept

  In this dear town of old forgetfulness;

  Here all entwined in dreams once long I slept

  And heard no echo of the world’s distress.

  Now he had grasped the urgency of the moment, as his official graduation, his attempt at publication and his marriage all demonstrate. After the wedding Edith was going to stay as close as possible to him, and would be leaving Warwick: ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ bids the town and its dreams goodbye.

  Tolkien was no mere nostalgist. The passing of time was the subject of a constant internal debate: part of him mourned what was gone and part of him knew change was necessary. In the Oxford of this poem, the past achieves an ideal status, not embalmed and half-forgotten, but vitally alive and full of significance for today.

  Thy thousand pinnacles and fretted spires

  Are lit with echoes and the lambent fires

  Of many companies of bells that ring

  Rousing pale visions of majestic days

  The windy years have strewn down distant ways;

  And in thy halls still doth thy spirit sing

  Songs of old memory amid thy present tears,

  Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears.

  In contrast to Warwick’s inertia, Oxford shows true continuity, based on academic erudition and the perpetual renewal of its membership.

  On a personal level, memories of undergraduate life crowd in. Tolkien, whose stays in Warwick were private, domestic, and circumscribed, had been the most sociable of Oxonians: understandably he used the university to symbolize lost fellowship and the tragedy of the war. The past is unnervingly present, so that in a visionary moment the intervening years or months are swept aside:

  O agéd city of an all too brief sojourn,

  I see thy clustered windows each one burn

  With lamps and candles of departed men.

  The misty stars thy crown, the night thy dress,

  Most peerless-magical thou dost possess

  My heart, and old days come to life again…

  Despite its elegant use of autobiographical material for symbolic purposes, ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’ is not altogether successful. Wiseman told Tolkien it was not ‘quite up to your usual standard’ and said the Oxford passage was unworthy of ‘the greatest city but London in the Empire of England’. A more serious flaw is that its attempt to locate consolation and hope in the university city seems merely wishful when its Belgian counterpart, Louvain, had been all but destroyed. The final optimistic assertion sounds a trifle shrill:

  Lo! though along thy paths no laughter runs

  While war untimely takes thy many sons,

  No tide of evil can thy glory drown

  Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown.

  The wanderer pledges allegiance to learning, living memory, and alertness, but (understandably) invests them with an unrealistic impregnability.

  Wiseman felt there was an ‘apparent lack of connection’ between the sections of the poem and said, ‘I am left hung up at the end between the Tolkienian ancestors taking root in Germany, and the Norman feudalists of the Castle while the author is still, as I know to my cost, an unsettled wanderer.’ But Oxford and Warwick seem to symbolize two responses to temporal change – responses that now appear to be mutually incompatible but which had co-existed blissfully in ancient Saxony. Without booklore, Tolkien’s remote Saxon ancestors had sung the ‘Songs of old memory’ now remembered in Oxford (at least in the English department); simultaneously they had listened to the pulse of the seasons without drifting into a static slumber like the Warwick nobles. The poem describes a fall into division of being.

  What goes unmentioned is Saxony’s situation in the Great War, the fate of Tolkien’s relatives there, or how his ancestry affected Tolkien’s patriotic allegiance to England (with its Norman aristocracy). The poem never sets out to deal with these subjects, but inevitably they hover around it.

  Tolkien remained in Warwick after completing the poem. On Wednesday 22 March 1916 he and Edith were married at the Roman Catholic church of St Mary Immaculate, near Warwick Castle. It was Lent: accordingly, they could only take part in the Marriage Service, and not the Nuptial Mass that would otherwise have followed. They spent a week’s honeymoon in the windswept village of Clevedon on the Severn Estuary during which they visited the caves at Cheddar. When they returned to Warwick, Tolkien found a letter from Sidgwick & Jackson informing him that they had decided not to publish The Trumpets of Faërie. He now faced the possibility that he might be killed with all his extraordinary words unheard.

  Meanwhile, Edith had little chance to see her new husband. Within a month of their wedding he was in Yorkshire taking a course at a signals school run by the army’s Northern Command at Farnley Park, Otley, and was away for several weeks of training and tests. On practical matters his performance was mediocre: using a lamp
he could signal at six words per minute, but the average speed was between seven and ten words. He did well in the written test and on map reading, however, and on 13 May he was issued with a provisional certificate permitting him to instruct army signallers. Tolkien left the same day for Warwick, having been given just two of the four days’ leave he had requested.

  Edith was now leaving the town for good. Tolkien’s battalion duties meant that they could not live together, but they had decided that Edith would take rooms as near as possible to his camp. Accordingly, she moved with her cousin Jennie Grove into the home of a Mrs Kendrick in Great Haywood, an attractive village on a beautiful stretch of the River Trent just below the northern shoulders of Cannock Chase. Across the Trent lay the manorial elegance of Shugborough Park, the seat of the Earls of Lichfield. An old and narrow packhorse bridge with fourteen arches spanned the stream here where it took in the waters of the River Sow. At Great Haywood the newlyweds received a nuptial blessing at the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist, in front of a Sunday congregation who (amid the national atmosphere of moral turpitude the TCBS so detested) seemed convinced that they had so far been living in sin.

  On the Somme, the squirming misery of the winter mud had given way to an incongruous renascence of anemones, poppies, bluebells, and cowslips. In some snatched moment of tranquillity, G. B. Smith had written:

  Now spring has come upon the hills in France,

  And all the trees are delicately fair,

  As heeding not the great guns’ voice, by chance

  Brought down the valley on a wandering air…

  Smith had sent home for a copy of the Odyssey, and the compartmentalized life continued in his letters to Tolkien, which dwelt almost exclusively on the poetry for which he fought, not on trench life itself – though he had mentioned a narrow escape on April Fool’s Day when an aeroplane deposited two bombs nearby. Censorship was not the reason: usually only details of troop movements were suppressed. Smith simply preferred (like many soldiers) to keep the horror and exhaustion out of his letters. But he longed for the company of his old friends: ‘I wish another council were possible…All the TCBS is ever in my thoughts, it is for them I carry on, and in the hope of a reunion refuse to be broken in spirit,’ he had written some time ago. A council of the four remained impossible, but now the opportunity came for a reunion with Tolkien.

  The week after Tolkien’s signals course ended, a telegram announced that Smith was back at home. The two quickly arranged to meet and, on the last Saturday of May 1916, a train carrying Smith pulled into Stafford station. Eight months had passed since the friends last met at Lichfield. Smith stayed overnight at Great Haywood, and for most of the Sunday too, eking out the splendid reunion as long as he could. ‘Nothing could have been more reassuring or more encouraging and inspiring than to see once again a TCBSite in the flesh and realise that he had changed not at all,’ Smith wrote on returning to his battalion in France. ‘Me I have no doubt you found different: more tired and less vigorous: but neither, I firmly believe, have I changed in any one vital particular. The TCBS has not shirked its plain duty: it will never shirk it: I am beyond words thankful for that.’

  The plain duty of the TCBS entailed the relinquishment of pleasure, and perhaps life itself, as Smith wrote in his spring poem:

  There be still some, whose glad heart suffereth

  All hate can bring from her misbegotten stores,

  Telling themselves, so England’s self draw breath,

  That’s all the happiness on this side death.

  This was a fellowship founded on laughter, schoolboy pranks, and youthful enthusiasms. At times, happiness seemed to live in the past, in the tea room at Barrow’s Stores, in the library cubby-hole at King Edward’s, or even in the Governor’s Room, sitting exams as the master paced silently up and down behind their backs and the smell of tar drifted in from New Street. ‘The real days’, a dejected Wiseman called them, ‘when one felt oneself to be somebody, and had something to substantiate the feeling, when it was possible to get something done, such as win a match or act a play or pass an exam, the most important things that ever can be done…’ Doubtless Tolkien, busily creative and newly married, felt rather differently about the value of his life since leaving school. Nevertheless, he saw the TCBS as an ‘oasis’ in an inhospitable world.

  Yet the Tea Club was now much more than a refuge. As well as hilarity and good conversation, TCBSianism had come to mean fortitude and courage and alliance. Smith, displaying his weakness for bombast, had once likened the four to the Russian army battling vastly superior German and Austro-Hungarian forces (‘the most magnificent spectacle Europe has seen for generations’, as he called it). But the TCBS had absorbed patriotic duty into its constitution not simply because its members were all patriots. The war mattered because it was being fought ‘so England’s self draw breath’: so that the inspirations of ‘the real days’ of peace might survive.

  One facet of their duty was not so plain. Somewhere along the line the TCBS had decided it could change the world. The view had been born on the rugby pitch in the spirited exploits of Wiseman and Tolkien, the Great Twin Brethren. It had grown during the battle to wrest control of school life from boorishness and cynicism – a prolonged struggle from which the TCBS had emerged victorious. The ejection of ‘Tea-Cake’ Barnsley and the vapid, irony-obsessed members of the TCBS had left the Council of London free to reaffirm the society’s sense of mission. Tolkien had told them that they had a ‘world-shaking power’, and (with the occasional exception of the more cautious Gilson) they all believed it.

  Now they felt that, for them, the war was only the preparation for the task that lay in store. It was a ‘travail underground’ from which they would emerge enriched, Gilson said. ‘I have faith,’ he ventured, ‘that the TCBS may for itself – never for the world – thank God for this war some day.’ Smith observed that ‘Providence insists on making each TCBSian fight his first battles alone’, and Wiseman underlined the fortifying virtue of the divine scheme. ‘Really you three, especially Rob, are heroes,’ he wrote. ‘Fortunately we are not entirely masters of our fate, so that what we do now will make us the better for uniting in the great work that is to come, whatever it may be.’

  All this might sound like so much hot air, were it not for two considerations. These young men were gifted members of a gifted generation; and they included in their ‘republic’ of equals a genius whose work has since reached an audience of millions. When orders arrived on Friday 2 June instructing him to travel to Folkestone for embarkation overseas, Tolkien already believed that the terrors to come might serve him in the visionary work of his life – if he survived.

  There was no fanfare when he left Cannock Chase. In contrast to his friends, who had marched out of their training camps with their entire divisions of more than 10,000 men, Tolkien went alone: his training battalion stayed at home and sent men out as and when the fighting battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers needed reinforcements.

  Tolkien was given forty-eight hours for his ‘last leave’. He and Edith went back to Birmingham, where on Saturday they spent a final night together at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, just down the road from the Oratory and Father Francis. The house in Duchess Road where he and Edith had met as lodgers was minutes away. Visible across the street was the Highfield Road house where he had lived with Hilary after contact with Edith was banned.

  Late on Sunday 4 June, 1916, Tolkien set off for the war. He did not expect to survive. ‘Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,’ he later recalled. ‘Parting from my wife then…it was like a death.’

  PART TWO

  Tears unnumbered

  SEVEN

  Larkspur and Canterbury-bells

  It was the darkest hour of the war so far for Tolkien. So it was for the Allies too. France had been bleeding at Verdun for fifteen pitiless weeks. Ireland, meanwhile, was simmering after the failed Easter Rising against British rule. But on S
aturday 3 June 1916, newspapers proclaimed the biggest blow so far to British self-confidence. The Grand Fleet had finally met the German navy in battle and, it seemed at first, had got the worst of it.

  Guiltily, Christopher Wiseman had come to enjoy life aboard his vast ‘Dreadnought’ warship, much of it spent at anchor in Scapa Flow. The Navy breed were contemptuous of landlubbers like himself; he was teetotal, whereas many of the officers seemed to live for drink; and they spoke without moving their lips. But there were occasional trips to the town of Kirkwall on Orkney or, weather permitting, rounds of golf on the tiny island of Flotta. Once, indulging his passion for archaeology, Wiseman led an expedition to explore the prehistoric barrow of Maes Howe. Teaching was also becoming something of a hobby, even though the trainee midshipmen in his care, colourfully known as ‘snotties’, proved intractable. He taught them mathematics, mechanics, and navigation, but like a true TCBSian he also tried to plug the gap in their literary education. ‘The Snotty,’ he told Tolkien, ‘is the stupidest boy in existence, and withal the most conceited. However, I like them all very much…’ Occasionally the Superb would sweep the North Sea up to Norway, but the Germans were never to be seen: the naval blockade was working, and the sole danger seemed to be boredom.

  But on 31 May 1916, the 101st day of the Battle of Verdun, Germany’s High Seas Fleet ventured out of port and Britain’s Grand Fleet took the bait, racing out from Scapa Flow to meet them off the coast of Denmark. Wiseman was set to oversee the Superb’s range-finding table. Early in the evening the Superb fired off several salvoes at a light cruiser over 10,000 yards away and flames were seen to burst out amidships. Surely this was a palpable hit, and the German vessel had been sunk. But no, it was afterwards seen, still in one piece, by ships astern. Again an hour later the Superb opened fire and struck home on the third and fourth salvoes; the enemy ship turned away, burning. The gunnery commander, who could see the battle with his own eyes, doubted many of Wiseman’s calculations; but the mist and the smoke of confrontation meant the fleets were fighting half-blind, and mathematics came into its own.