Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  If the Superb had been hit, the decks, which had no airtight compartments, would have swiftly flooded from prow to stern, as Wiseman was only too conscious: ‘No one below decks would get away in the case of a torpedo,’ he said. So it was fortunate for him and his 732 crewmates that she was in the centre of the fleet and never came under enemy fire, though between its two bursts of action the Superb passed close to the wreckage of the flagship Invincible, one of three British battle cruisers lost at Jutland. Men were in the chill water, clinging to flotsam and waving and cheering at the oncoming vessels. But the ships were ploughing ahead at full speed in a vast manoeuvre involving the whole Grand Fleet, and the men were swept under, or left bobbing in the wake. By the time the German fleet disengaged after nightfall, with the loss of just one of its own battle cruisers, over six thousand British seamen had been killed. All this overturned deeply held convictions that Britannia ruled the waves, even though it had kept its lead in the naval arms race against German rivalry during the run-up to the war. The news from Jutland, on the eve of Tolkien’s departure for France, was a profound blow to morale.

  When his train from London’s Charing Cross Station pulled in to Folkestone at one o’clock the following Monday, Tolkien found a town transformed from the quiet port he had seen in 1912 on camp with King Edward’s Horse. Now it was humming with activity, its hotels full of soldiers. He spent Monday night there and the next day, 6 June, boarded a troop ship that steamed across the Channel under escort by a destroyer. He watched the sea-birds wheeling over the grey waters and England recede, the Lonely Isle of his mythology.

  Somewhere inland from the French shores ahead, Rob Gilson was making a thumbnail sketch that day of his battalion as they snatched a rest at the side of a long tree-lined road, with the yellow sun westering behind them. The Cambridgeshires had moved south from the lowlands of Flanders into rolling Picardy, the ancient region through which the Somme wound; G. B. Smith was close by. Christopher Wiseman, now back at Scapa Flow, was having a rather chillier time as he led a party of snotties that day onto Hoy, the tallest of the Orkney islands. Disaster had befallen the British High Command. Lord Kitchener, the man whose rallying cry had propelled their generation into military service, had sailed the same day for Russia, and his ship had struck a mine shortly after sailing from Scapa Flow. Wiseman’s men were supposed to be searching for confidential documents that might have been washed ashore, but they found none; the snotties were more interested in hunting out puffins’ eggs: to his great consternation, they were quite unperturbed by Hoy’s 200-foot cliffs.

  At Calais the soldiers returning from leave were sent straight off to their battalions, but those arriving for the first time were sent to Étaples, the British Expeditionary Force’s base depot. ‘Eat-apples’, as it was known to the insular Tommy, was a veritable prison, notorious for its vindictive regime. Fenced in among the shoreland sands and pines, it consisted of a sprawl of warehouses and the tented camps run by each army division, British, Canadian, South African, Australian or New Zealand. Now, transferred out of his training battalion, Tolkien bedded down that first night with other men bound for the 32nd Division, to which G. B. Smith’s 19th Lancashire Fusiliers belonged. But it proved a false start. The next day he was assigned to the 25th Division and the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, which had seen heavy, and costly, fighting at Vimy Ridge in May. Possibly the posting was connected with the fact that the 11th Battalion’s signals officer, Lieutenant W. H. Reynolds, had been noticed for his exceptional work at Vimy and was about to be promoted above battalion level, thus creating a vacancy. But for Tolkien this was a blow to long-cherished hopes. To compound his bad luck, the kit he had bought at such expense on Smith’s advice had disappeared in transit, forcing him to cobble together a whole new set of equipment, including camp-bed and sleeping bag, for nights under canvas in the chill of what turned out to be a most wintry June.

  A message was sent off to tell the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers that he was there awaiting orders. The sense of edgy excitement evaporated, and Tolkien sank into boredom. Now he slept on the dusty hilltop where the 25th Division recruits were encamped, writing letters. To circumvent the censor, Tolkien adopted a code of dots by which Edith could locate him, and while he was in France she traced his movements on a large map pinned to the wall at Great Haywood. He was issued with a gas helmet (a chemically treated flannel bag with glass eyepieces and a valve for the mouth), the newly compulsory tin hat, and a rifle for drill. Every day he would march out in a column of over 50,000 men to the vast sandy bowl known as the Bull Ring, where he was mercilessly put through his paces along with hundreds of other officers. On days when it was not pelting with rain, the troops came back white with dust. The road to the Bull Ring passed the lines of many hospitals, and a huge military cemetery. Tolkien later recalled that his vision of a purgatorial encampment, the poem ‘Habbanan beneath the Stars’, might have originated here.

  Out of acute homesickness a new poem emerged, ‘The Lonely Isle’, describing his sea-crossing from England, to which the verse is dedicated.

  O glimmering island set sea-girdled and alone—

  A gleam of white rock through a sunny haze;

  O all ye hoary caverns ringing with the moan

  Of long green waters in the southern bays;

  Ye murmurous never-ceasing voices of the tide;

  Ye plumèd foams wherein the shoreland spirits ride;

  Ye white birds flying from the whispering coast

  And wailing conclaves of the silver shore,

  Sea-voiced, sea-wingèd, lamentable host

  Who cry about unharboured beaches evermore,

  Who sadly whistling skim these waters grey

  And wheel about my lonely outward way -

  For me for ever thy forbidden marge appears

  A gleam of white rock over sundering seas,

  And thou art crowned in glory through a mist of tears,

  Thy shores all full of music, and thy lands of ease—

  Old haunts of many children robed in flowers,

  Until the sun pace down his arch of hours,

  When in the silence fairies with a wistful heart

  Dance to soft airs their harps and viols weave.

  Down the great wastes and in a gloom apart

  I long for thee and thy fair citadel,

  Where echoing through the lighted elms at eve

  In a high inland tower there peals a bell:

  O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!

  G. B. Smith sent condolences that the hoped-for summer with Edith at Great Haywood had been cut short and that Tolkien would not be coming to join him in the Salford Pals. ‘I do pray for you at all times and in all places,’ he added, ‘and may you survive, and we survive the fiery trial of these events without loss of our powers or our determination. So shall all things be for good. Meanwhile trust God and keep your powder dry, and be assured that to three other men you are more than their own selves.’

  By the middle of June it was clear that something major was afoot in the counsels of the chiefs of staff. Rumours of spies abounded, but what was planned seemed public knowledge: a ‘show’ was to be launched somewhere near the Somme town of Albert at the end of the month. The ominous signs were apparent in a letter from Gilson thanking Tolkien for a note that had arrived as he came in from a trench working party on midsummer’s night. A friend and fellow officer had been struck by shell fragments while on a working party, and was thought to be near death. Gilson had travelled far since his school debating days, when he had once asserted that ‘war was not now of the first importance, and…was a scientific contest of calculation rather than of personal prowess’ – making it all sound rather bloodless. Now he wrote to Tolkien: ‘I have never felt more forcibly than in the last few weeks, the truth of your words about the oasis of TCBSianism. Life just now is a veritable desert: a fiery one. The TCBS never despised the ordeal and I don’t think they underrated it, mine has of late increased in intensity. None the l
ess I am cheerful enough and more grateful than I can say for the breaths of cool fresh air which the various members of the TCBS have given me from time to time.’

  Gilson had been in and out of the trenches near Albert for weeks. Now that the news of Jutland had been recast in a more favourable light, and with Russia making sweeping gains on the Eastern Front, he was beginning to sense ‘the war at last moving – towards the end’. He found time to marvel at the broad cloud-strewn skies or at the gothic genius behind Amiens cathedral, where he had managed to snatch several happy hours. But he had seen nothing of Smith, though he knew him to be tantalizingly near. The leave he had been hoping for since March had been postponed indefinitely, and he was exhausted. Wiseman had confided in Tolkien that he feared for Rob’s sanity. His real lifeline had been his correspondence not with the TCBS, but with Estelle King in Holland, yet twice now he had been disciplined by the censor for revealing too much about the military situation. ‘I feel now as if I hardly know what I might write of except the weather,’ he told her. Often in his almost daily letters he bemoaned the callousness war had instilled in him, but it was clearly a fragile veneer. ‘When it comes down to single human beings,’ he wrote, ‘I can hardly bear the horror of this war. Men you have known and lived and worked with for eighteen months carried away on stretchers, bleeding. It makes me feel like “peace at any price”…It is all cold-blooded and horrible.’

  Gilson told his father on 25 June that he could at least quash one bit of tittle-tattle with some confidence: that peace was being declared on the 26th. The incommunicable reality was rather different. On 24 June the massed British artillery had unleashed an unprecedented bombardment against seventeen miles of German trenches north of the River Somme. It went on steadily throughout the day, halving in force through the night but redoubling for ninety minutes the following morning. And so it was to continue every day: the prelude to the biggest battle the world had yet seen.

  ‘I often think,’ Gilson told his father, ‘of the extraordinary walk that might be made all along the line between the two systems of trenches, that narrow strip of “No Man’s Land” stretching from the Alps to the sea…’ But out of the whole line it was just here, around the River Somme, that the Allies were aiming their might. The German invaders had marched over the region in 1914, but when their bid to encircle Paris failed they had fallen back to the low hills to the east of Albert, cutting an unyielding double line of trenches deep into the chalk. The French had dug a similar, though less extravagant, set of trenches opposite, but now they had retired to concentrate their forces south of the river, and Kitchener’s armies had stepped in to the breach. The volunteers were not ready for battle, but Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, had agreed to commit these half-soldiers to a decisive attack before the French army could be wiped out at Verdun. Where the British and French lines met on the Somme, the hammerblow would fall.

  At last the orders came from the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers summoning their new subaltern, and Tolkien left sand-blown Étaples on Tuesday 27 June 1916, two days before the planned offensive. The unseasonal chill had given way to a summer heat interspersed with thundery showers. He slept on the train near Abbeville, but when it finally rolled in to Amiens the attack planned for Thursday had been postponed because of the weather. Tolkien ate a meal doled out at a field kitchen in the square, turned his back on the great cathedral, and marched up the road northward into the undulating cornfields and orchard-lands of Picardy, where cornflowers and poppies still bloomed blue and red, and feverfew and camomile and wormwood grew. But the skies opened, the road turned into a river, and he was drenched by the time he met up with his battalion.

  The eight hundred or so men of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were lodged in barns at Rubempré, a cluster of old but sturdy farms north-east of Amiens and thirteen miles from the front. It was just about the cleanest and most comfortable spot in the British army area behind the Somme front line, but Tolkien had to set up his new camp bed on a farmhouse floor. Late in the evening, another battalion of the same brigade marched in, tired and muddy, only to be sent on elsewhere because there was no room left. Flashes of artillery fire lit up expanses of sky all through the night, accompanied only by an incessant dull thudding.

  At seven o’clock the next morning, Thursday 29 June, to the accompaniment of intensive artillery fire away to the east, the men were outside for a last-ditch attempt to shape them up for combat. First they had an hour-long physical workout, then an hour of bayonet practice, drill, and marching ‘on the double’. About a quarter of the men were almost as new to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers as Tolkien, and four other officers had only arrived a day earlier. The commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Laurence Godfrey Bird, had stepped in less than two weeks previously. Most of the rest had been in France for nine months now, miners or weavers from the close-knit Lancashire towns of Burnley, Oldham, Bolton, Wigan, Preston, and Blackburn. North Lancashire miners also dominated a second battalion in the four-strong brigade, while a further battalion had been recruited largely from white-collar workers in the Wirral, Cheshire. This was a migrant community exiled from home, without women or children or old people, and the vast majority had joined up in the first two months of the war, many of them in their mill clogs. They had embarked from England on the day of the Loos offensive, and tradition held that they had been meant for the battle there but had got lost in transit.

  Tolkien felt an affinity with these working-class men. He had, after all, spent significant portions of his childhood either in run-down urban areas of Birmingham or among labouring folk in the villages on the outskirts of the city. But military protocol did not permit him to make friends among the ‘other ranks’. He had to take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters – the kind of job that would be done by any officer available, whether a platoon commander or not. If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty.

  As before, however, he shared billets and meals and a social life with the thirty or so other officers, particularly those in the company to which he was assigned, ‘A’ Company, who included several subalterns as platoon leaders under a captain. The brigade – the 74th – had been ‘stiffened’ by the addition of a regular army battalion from the Royal Irish Rifles, and a handful of the officers in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had also been career soldiers before the war. The older officers ‘were in many cases professional soldiers dug out of retirement’, notes Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Tolkien, ‘men with narrow minds and endless stories of India or the Boer War’. Such old campaigners Tolkien did not find so congenial: they treated him like an inferior schoolboy, he said. None of the officers he had got to know at Lichfield and Cannock Chase had been posted to the 11th Battalion, and he found he had little in common with many of the younger subalterns here. It became Tolkien’s confirmed opinion that ‘the most improper job of any man…is bossing other men’ and, he complained, ‘Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.’

  The battalion was on short notice to move in case of a sudden change of plan, but the clouds lowered, the winds gusted, and no attack took place. The men were given no chance to sit and brood on what lay in store for them in the coming days, and specialist officers gave instruction in machine-gunnery or bombing or (in Tolkien’s case) signals. The following day, 30 June, there was more of the same. Several officers and men were handed awards for acts of bravery back at Vimy Ridge. The brigade broke camp and, under cover of darkness, made a three-and-a-half-hour march towards the flickering eastern horizon, halting at one o’clock in the morning in a larger village, Warloy-Baillon, seven miles from the front line. During the afternoon strong winds had dispersed the rain clouds and the word had gone out that the great assault was now set for the next morning. Tolkien’s battalion was being saved for follow-up attacks. It was clear, however, that G. B. Smith’s was not.

  ‘My dear John Ronald,’ he had written f
ive days earlier, in a letter that found Tolkien with his new battalion, ‘the very best of luck in all that may happen to you within the next few months, and may we live beyond them to see a better time. For although I do not set much store upon my own powers, I set great store upon the combined work of the TCBS. And because we have been friends God bless you and preserve you to return to England and your wife.

  ‘After which the Deluge. If ever there was an hour in which that old priceless humour of the TCBS had an opportunity of surmounting all obstacles thrown in its way, it now is upon us…I would have written more but have had no time. And you must expect none in the future…Goodbye in the TCBS.’

  The same day, Rob Gilson had written to his father and to Estelle King describing a deserted and overgrown garden he had seen, ‘Larkspur and Canterbury-bells and cornflowers and poppies of every shade and kind growing in a tangled mass.’*

  It was, he commented, ‘One of the few really lovely things that the devastation of war produces. There are many grand and awe-inspiring sights. Guns firing at night are beautiful – if they were not so terrible. They have the grandeur of thunderstorms. But how one clutches at the glimpses of peaceful scenes. It would be wonderful to be a hundred miles from the firing line once again.’ Gilson wrote no valedictions. Pacing among the tents behind the ruins of Albert on one of those wet and muddy nights, he told a friend: ‘It is no use harrowing people with farewell letters; it is not as if we were prodigal sons. Those who survive can write all that is necessary.’