A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism In the Cataclysm of 1914–1918

by Joseph Loconte

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOSEPH LOCONTE

  God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for

  Religious Freedom in the West

  The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt

  The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders

  Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm

  Seducing the Samaritan: How Government

  Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services

  © 2015 by Joseph Loconte

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Nelson Books and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Author is represented by the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: Material from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Hobbit, Tree and Leaf, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Silmarillion.

  THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA by C.S. Lewis copyright © C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1950–1956. Extracts reprinted by permission.

  ISBN: 978-0-7180-2177-1 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930874

  ISBN: 978-0-7180-2176-4

  ISBN: 978-0-7180-7923-9 (IE)

  15 16 17 18 19 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mom and Dad, who first taught me courage; for my grandparents, who endured the Great War; and for the children of Ventotene

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Funeral of a Great Myth

  Chapter 2: The Last Battle

  Chapter 3: In a Hole in the Ground There Lived a Hobbit

  Chapter 4: The Lion, the Witch, and the War

  Chapter 5: The Land of Shadow

  Chapter 6: That Hideous Strength

  Conclusion: The Return of the King

  Acknowledgments

  A Remembrance

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Photos

  “The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them.”

  — Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918

  “Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer to understanding the mystery of human life.”

  — John Keegan, The First World War

  “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.”

  — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

  INTRODUCTION

  In the throes of one of the most destructive and dehumanizing wars in world history, something extraordinary occurred, never to be repeated. It happened on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914.

  The “Great War” had been raging for five ferocious months. Neither side could gain a decisive advantage: despite plans and promises to the contrary, the European armies were “racing to deadlock.”1 Deployed into France, most of the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 160,000 men had been wiped out at Mons, Le Cateau, and Ypres. Casualties among the French and German armies were even more staggering. In the opening weeks of the war, the French lost 300,000 men. By the end of December, France and Germany had sustained combat losses of well over 600,000 soldiers, with many more wounded or missing. Some of the fighting had been hand-to-hand. As a German account of the first Battle of Ypres described it: “The enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks.”2

  And, yet, on Christmas Eve, the armies on both sides of the Western Front put down their weapons, sang hymns, and treated their enemies as brothers.

  No one ordered the now-famous Christmas truce of 1914. No one could have planned for it. It arose spontaneously, without warning, among officers as well as ordinary soldiers, along hundreds of miles of fortified defenses. “Between the trenches, the hated and bitter opponents meet around the Christmas tree and sing Christmas carols,” Josef Wenzl, a soldier in the German infantry, wrote to his parents. “This once in a lifetime vision I will not forget.”3

  The biblical Angel of Death descended upon the households of Egypt during Israel’s captivity, and destroyed them. This visitation was its reverse: an outbreak of humanity that swept through the lines across the Western Front. Beginning on Christmas Eve and extending into Christmas Day, the killing machines of the Great War went silent. Soldiers came out of their trenches and greeted their adversaries in “No Man’s Land,” the dead-zone separating enemy defenses. They gathered to sing “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) and to exchange food, drinks, and tobacco. “Gradually firing ceased almost everywhere along the line that Christmas Eve,” writes historian Modris Eksteins. “The Christmas spirit had simply conquered the battlefield.”4

  INTO THE ABYSS

  The Christmas spirit of December 1914 was soon dragged into an abyss of death and desolation. Much of the vigor and confidence and decency of the West seemed to vanish with it. Like no other war before it, explains historian John Keegan, the First World War “damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also.”5 Paul Johnson has described the conflict as “the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the twentieth century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind.”6 Winston Churchill, who fought in the war, also reflected somberly on its aftermath: “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization.”7

  The year 2014 marked the centennial of the beginning of that tragedy: the war to make the world safe for democracy, the war to end all wars, the war to usher in the kingdom of heaven. Instead, the Great War laid waste to a continent and destroyed the hopes and lives of a generation. Before it was all over, nearly every family in Europe was grieving the loss of a family member, or helping others to grieve, or caring for a wounded soldier struggling to adjust to civilian life. It was, in the words of author Aldous Huxley, “a gruesome kind of universe.”8

  The livelihoods of
hundreds of millions of people, including members of my own family, were disrupted or ruined by the conflict. My paternal grandfather, Michele Loconte, who had emigrated from a small village near Bari, in southern Italy, was living in the United States when hostilities broke out. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was sent to France in 1918, the year American troops began arriving on the Western Front. He survived the war, but rarely spoke of it. My maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Aiello, left his island home of Ventotene, off the coast of Naples, a region in southern Italy economically decimated during the war years. He arrived in New York City in 1921, just before Mussolini and the fascists swept into power in Rome. Both of my grandparents were determined to start their lives over in the United States.

  Scholars continue to debate the causes and outcome of the war. In Forgotten Victory, Gary Sheffield admits the horrific nature of the conflict but insists that “it was neither futile nor meaningless.”9 A belligerent Germany, he writes, had designs for conquest and domination that the democracies of Europe could not ignore. Nevertheless, in Barbara Tuchman’s memorable phrase, “the guns of August” signaled the initiation of a European suicide pact: millions of young men would perish in the trenches and the barbed wire and the mechanized slaughter of a conflict that no one had imagined and no one knew how to stop.

  Like no other force in history, the First World War permanently altered the political and cultural landscape of Europe, America, and the West. In the judgment of more than one historian, the war became “the axis on which the modern world turned.”10 Literary critic Roger Sale has called the conflict “the single event most responsible for shaping the modern idea that heroism is dead.”11 For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and the end of faith.

  AGAINST THE TIDE

  Yet for two extraordinary authors and friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the Great War deepened their spiritual quest. Both men served as soldiers on the Western Front, survived the trenches, and used the experience of that conflict to shape their Christian imagination. Tolkien created The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, the second best-selling novel ever written and among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Lewis earned fame for The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven immensely popular children’s books ranked among the classics. It can be argued that these epic tales—involving the sorrows and triumphs of war—would never have been written had these authors not been flung into the crucible of combat.

  The First World War placed an immense burden of loss on their generation. “Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuver,” Churchill once observed. “The greater the general, the more he contributes to manoeuver, the less he demands in slaughter.”12 The generals of this war demanded much in slaughter. By the time of the Armistice, more than nine million soldiers lay dead and roughly thirty-seven million wounded. On average, there were about 6,046 men killed every day of the war, a war that lasted 1,566 days. In Great Britain, almost six million men—a quarter of Britain’s adult male population—passed through the ranks of the army. About one in eight perished.13

  Tolkien and Lewis might easily have been among their number. As a second lieutenant in the BEF, Tolkien spent many days and nights on the Western Front, often under fire. He fought at the Battle of the Somme, one of the fiercest concentrations of killing in the history of human conflict. “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel full its oppression,” Tolkien wrote decades later. “But as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”14

  Also commissioned as a second lieutenant in the BEF, Lewis was sent immediately to the front. The experience of six months of trench warfare, a vortex of suffering and death, remained with him throughout his life. As he once reflected, unromantically: “My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil.”15 Lewis would describe the emotion of grief as “the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment.”16 Like Tolkien, he lost most of his closest friends in the conflict.

  After the war, Tolkien and Lewis made their way to Oxford University, where they took up their vocations as instructors in English literature. They met for the first time in 1926, and a bond of friendship was established that would transform their lives and careers. Tolkien would play a crucial role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, while Lewis would be the decisive voice in persuading Tolkien to complete The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Given the massive and enduring influence of their works, it is hard to think of a more consequential friendship in the twentieth century—a friendship that emerged from the suffering and sorrow of a world war.

  These Christian authors were swimming against the tide of their times. During the postwar years, many veterans composed fiercely anti-war novels and poetry. Many more became moral cynics. Yet Tolkien and Lewis—deeply aware of “the beauty and mortality of the world”—insisted that war could inspire noble sacrifice for humane purposes.17 As a generation of young writers rejected faith in the God of the Bible, they produced stories imbued with the themes of guilt and grace, sorrow and consolation.

  Journalist Walter Lipmann, reflecting on the spiritual consequences of the First World War, lamented that “trivial illusions” had displaced traditional religious belief. “What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents,” he wrote, “but their disillusionment with their own rebellion.”18 Part of the achievement of Tolkien and Lewis was to reintroduce into the popular imagination a Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment.

  A FLIGHT BACK TO REALITY

  Both authors, of course, have been accused of escapism. Their choice of literary genre, the romantic myth, was by some estimations “essentially an attempt to liberate themselves from the ugliness and moral impasse of the modern world.”19 Yet neither Tolkien nor Lewis took their cues from works extolling escapist fantasies or the glorification of war. Tolkien was drawn to tales such as Beowulf, with its dark view of the contest between good and evil. “Its characteristic struggle between man and monster must end ultimately, within Time, in man’s defeat,” writes Patricia Meyer Spacks. “Yet man continues to struggle; his weapons are the hobbit-weapons: naked will and courage.”20 Thus in The Lord of the Rings we find great sobriety about the prospects of final victory in this present life, as in the words of Galadriel: “Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”

  When Lewis was asked to name the books that did the most to shape his professional life, he included Virgil’s Aeneid, the mythic and violent story of Rome’s beginnings. It is no nursery school fairy tale. Aeneas’s subordination of desire to duty, his willingness to accept his arduous calling, makes him a heroic figure. But, as Lewis once observed, the travails he must endure make the work a “great and hard and bitter epic.”21 Though written for children, the same might be said of Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. There is an ultimate triumph of light over darkness in the story, but not without bloodshed, terrible loss, and the fear of death. “Take my advice,” says Mr. Beaver, “whenever you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”22

  Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to the genres of myth and romance not because they sought to escape the world, but because for them the real world had a mythic and heroic quality. The world is the setting for great conflicts and great quests: it creates scenes of remorseless violence, grief, and suffering, as well as deep compassion, courage, and selfless sacrifice. In an era that exalted cynicism and irony, Tolkien and Lewis sought to reclaim an older tradition of the epic
hero. Their depictions of the struggles of Middle-earth and Narnia do not represent a flight from reality, but rather a return to a more realistic view of the world as we actually find it.

  Indeed, it was the experience of war that provided much of the raw material for the characters and themes of their imaginative works. In a talk called “Learning in War Time,” Lewis explained how war exposes the folly of placing our happiness in utopian schemes to transform society. “If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”23 As we’ll see, unlike the disillusionment that overwhelmed much of his generation, Lewis would use the experience of war—its horror as well as its nobility—as a guidepost to moral clarity.

  Likewise for Tolkien, who emerged from the war with a profound respect for the ordinary soldier. As an officer in the British army, he could not befriend the many privates who made up his battalion, nor the “batmen,” the servants assigned to look after an officer’s gear and attend to his daily needs. But war has a way of softening military hierarchies. As Tolkien fought alongside these soldiers, he witnessed again and again their remarkable determination under fire. Indeed, as he later acknowledged, one of the great heroic figures in The Lord of the Rings is based on his firsthand knowledge of the men in the trenches of the Great War: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”24

  A MESSAGE FOR OUR TIME

  Military historian Victor Davis Hanson once observed that the history of the West is almost the history of warfare. “Democratic citizenship,” he writes, “requires knowledge of war.”25 Tolkien and Lewis never sought the intimate knowledge of combat that they acquired as young men. Indeed, it cannot be emphasized enough that neither man welcomed the arrival of war or ever romanticized what war was about. “I am no warrior at all,” protests Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, “and dislike any thought of battle.”26 How could it be otherwise, given what they and their generation endured?