Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  For Tolkien, as for Gilson’s friends in the Cambridgeshires, personal loss was piled on top of the horror and exhaustion of battle. There was no counselling for bereavement or post-traumatic stress in this army; it was business as usual. But by chance Tolkien was given a brief respite after his arrival back in Bouzincourt from the attack on Ovillers. That night, Monday 17 July 1916, he bivouacked at Forceville, on the road to the elegant country town of Beauval, where the 25th Division moved for a rest fifteen miles from the front. After an inspection by the divisional commander on 19 July, Tolkien sat down to dinner with the other officers of ‘A’ Company – those that were left. The man who commanded the company when Tolkien had joined it was already dead. Two subalterns had been packed off wounded four nights ago from Ovillers (Waite, a Lincolns Inn lawyer, having taken a couple of bullets in his abdomen and hip). That left Fawcett-Barry, an army careerist earmarked as the new company commander; Altham, the intelligence officer, from battalion headquarters; Captain Edwards, the machine-gun officer, also from headquarters and just nineteen years old; plus the recent arrivals – Tolkien, Loseby, and Atkins. Tolkien appears to have been mess officer that day. Dinner and whiskey were served by the batmen, Harrison, Arden, and Kershaw.

  The batman performed domestic chores for an officer: making his bed, tidying and polishing, and furnishing his table with the best. This was a practical arrangement, not just a luxury. Officers undoubtedly led a cushier life than the other ranks, but they had little time to spare from training, directing working parties, and, on ‘days off’, censoring the men’s inevitable letters home (a deeply divisive and unpopular duty). A resourceful batman could win a great deal of gratitude and respect. Tolkien, who found it hard to warm to his fellow officers, developed a profound admiration for the batmen he knew. However, the batman was not primarily a servant but a private soldier who acted as a runner for officers in action. As such he had to be both fit and intelligent so that he did not garble the orders or reports. Like any other private, he also fought in the field. One of the ‘A’ Company batmen, Thomas Gaskin, a working-class Manchester man, was among the thirty-six Fusiliers killed or missing at Ovillers. Tolkien preserved a poignant letter from Gaskin’s mother asking about her son.

  The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered 267 casualties in a fortnight. At that rate, without fresh drafts and a lengthy break from combat, the unit would have ceased to exist in another month; but the battalion had to be reorganized at Beauval because of its losses.

  At the same time, Tolkien was appointed battalion signal officer (and probably acting lieutenant). His predecessor left to work for the brigade and Tolkien was put in charge of all the unit’s communications, with a team of non-commissioned officers and privates to work for him as runners, wirers, and telephone operators and to help him set up signal stations wherever the battalion moved. It was a heavy responsibility at a difficult time. He needed to know the locations and station calls of all coordinating units; to be au fait with the plans and intentions of Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, the CO; and to keep the brigade informed about any unit movements or signals problems. But all this information had to be kept a close secret. The first soldiers to penetrate Ovillers had made an unpleasant discovery among the enemy papers: a verbatim transcript of the British order to attack the village on 1 July. Signalling was the focus of fresh paranoia, and was under severe scrutiny from above. There were lectures for officers and tickings-off for battalion commanders about the ineffective use of signals on the Somme.

  Tolkien stepped up to his new role on Friday 21 July 1916, just in time to make even more of a challenge of his first experience of that staple of life on the Western Front, trench duty. That Sunday, the next phase of the Somme offensive was launched, a furious and tragically costly attack on Pozières, up the Roman road from Albert, by Australian volunteers fighting for King and motherland. On 24 July, Tolkien’s unit was called instead to trenches at the north of the Somme front. Here near Auchonvillers – inevitably dubbed by the troops ‘Ocean Villas’ – another great mine had been exploded at the start of the Big Push, but no ground had been gained. Tolkien was on the old front line facing Beaumont-Hamel, a German position nestled in a deep gash. To the south-east the land dipped steeply to the Ancre, and beyond it, two miles away, the Schwaben Redoubt hunched above the battlefield, at the high head of Thiepval Ridge. The Fusiliers were welcomed by shellfire as they were settling in. In the dugout of battalion headquarters Tolkien worked alongside Bird, his adjutant Kempson, Altham the intelligence officer, and John Metcalfe, who had become one of the army’s youngest captains after running away from home to enlist and was now acting as second-in-command to Bird. Over the next five days Tolkien ran communications to the brigade command post in a village a mile and a half off, and the Royal Engineers came to lay a new cable. The Fusiliers were busy, especially after dark, digging deep dugouts and widening the trenches for use in a later attack. The working parties were spotted one night and shells cascaded about them.

  The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were withdrawn from ‘Ocean Villas’ on the morning of 30 July and went into divisional reserve in a wood near the village of Mailly-Maillet. Regimental battle honours were celebrated on Minden Day, 1 August, the anniversary of the Battle of Minden of 1759 in which the Lancashire Fusiliers had helped defeat the French. There was a rose for every soldier – and blindfold boxing, an apt though unintentional parody of the Somme. After a hot and busy week (the soldiers were repairing trenches by night) they were pulled out of reserve on Saturday 5 August to a camp another few miles back, and the next day Tolkien was able to attend Mass in the Roman Catholic church at the village of Bertrancourt.

  On Monday morning Tolkien was ordered to go with one other subaltern, Second Lieutenant Potts, and five sergeant-majors to set up battalion headquarters in trenches yet further north, near the ruined sucrerie or sugar beet refinery and the new mass grave between Colincamps and the German trenches at Serre. They found the front line itself badly blown-in and impassable by daylight, having been virtually obliterated at the start of the Somme. Nevertheless the battalion had to follow Tolkien’s advance party in and set to work with pick and shovel amid intermittent bombardments that killed four men. But on 10 August, a day of rain, the Fusiliers marched back to Bus-lès-Artois, where they had stayed en route from Beauval to their first stint of trench-duty. From this vantage point, war seemed far away; cornfields rolled into the distance, and gardens and orchards concealed the surrounding villages. As before, they were lodged in huts in a wood on the northern edge of the village. For two nights, however, Tolkien sat out under the wet trees, deep in thought.

  A note from G. B. Smith had reached him some two weeks earlier, voluble in its brevity. He had been re-reading a poem by Tolkien about England (probably ‘The Lonely Isle’): one of the best, he said. But Smith’s note carried no reference to Gilson’s death, nor any indication of what Tolkien had written in response to the news. The impression is of thoughts inexpressible or shut away, and vitality sapped.

  Since then he had forwarded a brief letter from Christopher Wiseman regarding Rob’s death. The two were in agreement: weighed in the scales of life, Gilson for all his flaws was as gold compared to the drossy mass of people. In Smith’s words, ‘such a life, even though its accomplishment was nothing, even though it passed almost unseen, even though no guiding principle ruled it and marked it out, even though doubt and misgiving, storm and stress raged always in his developing mind, is in the sight of God and all men worthy of the name of a value inconceivably higher than those of the idle chatterers who fill the world with noise, and leave it no emptier for their loss. Because the nobility of character and action once sent into the world does not return again empty.’

  Tolkien had replied in a similar vein. Regarding, presumably, those same ‘idle chatterers’, the journalists and their readers whom Smith execrated, he wrote that ‘No filter of true sentiment, no ray of real feeling for beauty, women, history or their country shall ever reac
h them again.’ Evidently all three were in the grip of the anger that comes with grief. Their choice of target was entirely in keeping with TCBSian precepts. After all, the TCBS had vied against the boorish and empty-headed set at school, and the Council of London had cast out T. K. Barnsley and his fellow ironists. This is the spirit in which Smith wrote,

  Save that poetic fire

  Burns in the hidden heart,

  Save that the full-voiced choir

  Sings in a place apart,

  Man that’s of woman born,

  With all his imaginings,

  Were less than the dew of morn,

  Less than the least of things.

  At the same time, war-propaganda and its consumers were regularly demonized by soldiers of the Great War. The feeling arose from a combination of factors: knowledge that the propaganda was false, suspicion that those at home would never comprehend the reality of the trenches, and bitterness that friends and heroes died while the profiteers and their dupes sat in comfort and safety. The mood finds its most famous expression in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Blighters’, a mortal curse upon music-hall jingoists (‘I’d love to see a tank come down the stalls, / Lurching to ragtime tunes…’). Smith expressed an apocalyptic variant in ‘To the Cultured’:

  What are we, what am I?

  Poor rough creatures, whose life

  Is ‘depressing’ and ‘grey’,

  Is a heart-breaking strife

  With death and with shame

  And your polite laughter,

  Till – the world pass away

  In smoke and in flame,

  And some of us die,

  And some live on after

  To build it anew.

  A glance across the Channel to these ‘cultured’ rich and those ‘idle chatterers’ was enough to confirm that, although Rob Gilson was dead, his worth outlived him.

  Wiseman found further consolation in one of Gilson’s sentiments, that ‘the entirety of the TCBS was its whole value to itself’: in other words, its point was simply the best kind of fellowship. It is indeed hard to escape the impression that constant reference to the impersonal initials ‘TCBS’ in the correspondence between the four was a way of concealing the mutual affection these young men felt towards each other. Yet Gilson’s sentiment ran counter to the vision they had also shared of ‘the great work’ they would ultimately do together. It was truly the sentiment of a ‘doubting Thomas’, as Smith described Gilson, and it implied that what the TCBS achieved in life mattered not a jot.

  Tolkien had posted Wiseman’s letter back to Smith, adding his own underlinings and annotations. With these he now found that he disagreed. He could scarcely express much of what had gone through his mind since then. He felt hungry, lonely, and powerless, and oppressed by ‘the universal weariness of all this war’. Despite rumour, he had no more idea of the battalion’s next move than of Smith’s whereabouts; but following his vigil in the wood, Tolkien wrote a long letter amid the noise of several meals in the company mess. ‘I have lots of jobs on,’ he said before he signed off. ‘The Bde. Sig. Offr. is after me for a confabulation, and I have two rows to have with the QM and a detestable 6.30 parade – 6.30pm of a sunny Sabbath.’* His declaration to Smith was austere. ‘I have sat solemnly down and tried to tell you drily just what I think,’ he admitted. ‘I have made it sound very cold and distant.’

  Gilson had achieved the greatness of sacrifice but not, Tolkien wrote, greatness of the particular sort the TCBS had envisioned. ‘The death of any of its members is but a bitter winnowing of those who were not meant to be great – at least directly,’ he said. As for the fellowship that had shared those dreams, Tolkien’s conclusion was no less stark.

  So far my chief impression is that something has gone crack. I feel just the same to both of you – nearer if anything and very much in need of you…but I don’t feel a member of a little complete body now. I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended…I feel a mere individual…

  Wiseman indeed had placed such faith in God’s plan for the four that he had denied any might die before its fruition. If it was God’s purpose that the TCBS should do some work as a unity, he had written back in March, ‘and I can’t help thinking it is, then He will hear our prayer and we shall all be kept safe and united until it is His pleasure to stop this eruption of Hell.’ Wiseman’s worst apprehensions had indeed been focused on Gilson, but they had been of an entirely different nature. ‘He will come out of this an enormous man…if he can keep his senses,’ he had added. ‘Insanity is what I fear most.’ The expression shell shock had now entered the English language. In fact Gilson’s foresight had been the clearer: the TCBS faced an enormous task, he had said; ‘we shall not see it accomplished in our lifetime’. But Tolkien’s declaration at Bus-lès-Artois flew in the face of G. B. Smith’s most solemn convictions. Facing the horror of a night patrol back in February, Smith had stated expressly that ‘the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS…Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!’

  G. B. Smith had learned of Rob’s death at the end of an ordeal at Ovillers probably more hellish than Tolkien’s. The Salford Pals, half the battalion they had been at the start of the Somme offensive, had succeeded in seizing the south-west corner of the German stronghold during three days and nights of bayonet-fighting and bomb-throwing in smashed trenches. Enemy snipers had been ceaselessly active, claiming many victims. Smith, as intelligence officer, had questioned a group of German soldiers who were caught as they tried to flee. The interrogation was not harsh. ‘They were lost, nearly surrounded, and hungry and thirsty,’ he wrote in his report. But other duties were nightmarish: he had to collect letters and papers from the wounded and dead Prussian Guards (some killed up to two weeks previously in the great bombardment), and examine identity discs for information about the enemy’s deployments. And trenches the Pals took were choked with corpses.

  ‘I am truly afraid we can’t possibly meet,’ Smith had written in his taciturn note about ‘The Lonely Isle’. He had then been thirty miles away from the Somme, and on the verge of moving elsewhere again for a while. Immediately after Ovillers, the Salford Pals had marched north, but at the end of July they had left their brigade and moved on to retrain under the Royal Engineers as a ‘pioneer’ battalion. Tough men, largely recruited from the coalfields, they had long been marked down for this: pioneers carried out an infantry division’s heavy labour. Smith (though Tolkien did not know it) was now back, based in Hédauville not far from Bouzincourt. Half the Pals were running a supplies railway in the wood west of the Ancre, near where they had spent the night before the Big Push. The other half were excavating new trenches on the other side of the river and out to the eastern tip of Blighty Wood, where hundreds of their friends and comrades had been shot down on the first day of the great battle. The men worked under sporadic shellfire.

  Now Smith desperately wanted to see Tolkien. ‘Tonight I cannot sleep for memories of Rob and the last time I saw him,’ he wrote on 15 August. ‘I wish I could find you – I search for you everywhere.’ Three days later he received Tolkien’s obituary on the TCBS. He disagreed with it at almost every point.

  As chance would have it, that day Tolkien’s division moved its headquarters to Hédauville. Its battalions were going to take over a two-mile stretch of the front line from the fighting units of Smith’s division. Accordingly, the following afternoon, Saturday 19 August, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers marched into Hédauville and set up their tents south of the village, en route to the trenches. Smith went looking for Tolkien, but was told that he was away on a course.

  The 25th Division had recalled all its battalion signal officers that Wednesday for a week of instruction, during which they were taught the error of their ways: their messages were too wordy, their phone calls too long, their battlefield stations too conspicuous; they relied too heavily on their runners and too little on their pigeons. But there was go
od news for Tolkien and the other battalion signal officers. Amid the enormous losses on the Somme, some of them had been made to fill in for fallen company commanders, but as part of the ongoing shake-up in communications this was now stopped.

  Failing to find his friend, Smith decided forthwith to communicate his righteous anger by mail. ‘I want you to regard this rather violent letter as a sort of triumphal ode to the glorious memories and undiminished activity of RQG who although gone from among us is still altogether with us,’ he wrote. He was returning Tolkien’s long letter – with the addition of some ‘rather curt and perhaps rude’ annotations. ‘We are sure to meet presently, to which I enormously look forward. I am not quite sure whether I shall shake you by the hand or take you by the throat…’

  The chance to find out arose that day. Tolkien was at Acheux, less than three miles away, and in the event the two finally caught up with each other. Signal instruction detained Tolkien when his battalion moved into the trenches, and from Saturday until the course ended he was able to see Smith every day.

  Three issues were at stake: the ‘greatness’ of Rob Gilson, the purpose of the TCBS, and whether the club had survived his death. Smith was furious that Tolkien had concluded their friend was ‘not meant to be great’ and had responded with the question: ‘Who knows whether Rob has not already spread an essence as widely as we ever shall…?’ (The frankly stricken letters from Rob’s fellow Cambridgeshires to Cary Gilson suggest that this was not mere sentimentality: the Headmaster’s son clearly affected many friends deeply.) ‘He certainly was a doubting Thomas,’ Smith added, ‘but…I never expect to look upon his like again.’