Tolkien and Lewis encountered the horrific progeny of this thinking—in the trenches and barbed wire and mortars of the Great War—and it gave them great pause about human potentiality. On the one hand, the characters in their novels possess a great nobility: creatures endowed with a unique capacity for virtue, courage, and love. Indeed, a vital theme throughout is the sacred worth of the individual soul; in Middle-earth and in Narnia, every life is of immense consequence. On the other hand, their characters are deeply flawed individuals, capable of great evil, and in desperate need of divine grace to overcome their predicament. Both authors thus reflect the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.
As we’ll see, this frankly religious doctrine—the biblical fall—was confirmed by their experience of war. It would supply the moral architecture for their stories, giving them an enduring sense of realism and relevance. “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” Aslan tells Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”59 Tolkien wrote that the idea of “the Fall of Man” lurked behind every story, and that “all stories are ultimately about the fall.”60
THE MERCILESS MACHINERY OF WAR
The deep moral conundrum of The Lord of the Rings, of course, involves a weapon: a powerful Ring that could overcome the forces of evil arrayed against Middle-earth, yet which threatens to corrupt anyone who tries to use it, even those whose motives are pure. When Frodo is reunited with Bilbo at Rivendell, for example, he encounters an individual momentarily distorted by his lust for the Ring. “To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands.”61
In the opening pages of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we meet Jadis, “the last Queen,” a woman of immense wickedness. She holds the secret of “the Deplorable Word,” a force that can destroy entire worlds, a power too terrible to contemplate. “What was it?” asks Digory. “That was the secret of secrets,” says Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. . . . I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it.”62
Perhaps this was the most terrifying result of The Myth of Progress: it inspired great advances in military technology, but failed to advance any new theories of warfare to address the consequences of this technology on the battlefield. The years leading up to the First World War initiated a new era of military planning, for example, in which the modern European rail network enabled the swift mobilization of troops and armaments. This by itself amounted to a revolution in how the next conflict would be fought.
Yet when war arrived in August 1914, hardly anyone grasped what the human costs would be. Observes historian Niall Ferguson: “Suddenly, the vast resources of the European industrial economies were diverted from production to destruction.”63
Ironically, among the fruits of industrialization were rising health and living standards, which allowed for rapid population growth—and larger and more destructive armies. There were millions more young men available for military service than ever before. At the outbreak of the war, Germany would quickly mobilize 715,000 men, Austria 600,000, France 400,000, and Russia more than a million. Even Great Britain, with its all-volunteer army, would call up 165,000 troops.
Now, thanks to science and technology, soldiers could be shuttled into war zones—ten times faster by rail than by horse and foot—on a timetable as precise as a Swiss watch. In England, in the space of five days, eighteen hundred special trains ran south to Southampton, one arriving every three minutes for sixteen hours a day. Fourteen French railways carried fifty-six trains a day. Trains could deliver men to and from the front lines as if they were shift-workers in a factory.64 By an “inflexible calculation,” writes John Keegan, military planners would dictate how many troops could be carried at what speed to any designated border zone. “Trains were to fill the memories of all who went to war in 1914.”65
On June 28, 1914, an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo set a vast political-military machine into motion. By midnight on August 4, five empires were at war: the German Empire against Britain, France, and Russia; the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Serbia; the Russian Empire against Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the British and French Empires against Germany. Each side was confident, supremely confident, of swift victory. Just as French troops expected to reach Berlin before the fall, so the Germans believed they would parade down the Champs-Elysee in Paris in six weeks. Observes historian Martin Gilbert: “It was a careful, precise, and comforting calculation.”66
The Myth of Progress that made such calculations conceivable also created the instruments of war that would render them horribly obsolete. Neither the generals nor the politicians were thinking in moral terms about the consequences of mechanized warfare.
Battleships, submarines, the motorized transport of troops, the heavy siege howitzers, the machine guns, tanks, barbed wire, poison gas, flamethrowers, the thousands of miles of trenches—all of this awaited the soldiers of the Great War. The mass production of artillery became a kind of holy grail throughout the conflict. Advances in the destructive power of explosives and in the size, mobility, and accuracy of artillery meant that shocking numbers of men could be killed from long distances, without ever seeing what hit them. Hence the construction of trenches along the Western Front and the beginning of a war of attrition. Almost immediately the war was described “like a colossal machine, chewing up men and munitions like so much raw material.”67
“There was every expectation that the conflict would be brief, that the latest military technology would limit the scale of damage on all sides,” writes W. M. Spellman. “Indeed many viewed the prospect of a general war as cathartic and cleansing. War would renew each nation’s sense of purpose while liberating factory workers, farmers, office clerks, and students from their dull workaday activities, the complacency of bourgeois existence.”68
Instead, the war would last longer, and be fought with greater savagery, than anyone dared to imagine. The mutilated bodies of numberless millions of factory workers, farmers, clerks, and students would be consigned to graves scattered throughout Europe. The smallest villages, with their proud and austere cemeteries, still bear witness to their own part in the conflict. In the main piazza in Bitritto, where my grandfather Michele was born, there is a memorial to the caduti, the fallen in battle, Even my grandfather Giuseppe’s home of Ventotene—a tiny and obscure island in the Tyrrhenian Sea—has a monument in its piazza to those who perished “nella grande guerra.”
WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT
The early apostles of The Myth of Progress believed they had overcome the problems of industrial society. More than that, they imagined that they had solved the riddle of human existence.
“Progress, visible in every facet of life and ruling as the governing force behind existence, brought order to a world of change and moral purpose to a universe otherwise disturbingly random and meaningless,” writes historian Richard Gamble. “This faith in progress anchored the soul.”69 A generation later, the leaders of England and the rest of Europe assumed that their science, education, philanthropy, gentility, and religion represented the future of Western civilization. Even war would serve to advance the destiny of humanity. “Their confident belief in progress and the idea that enlightened self-interest would bring harmony to the whole world was, in retrospect, an illusion,” concludes Roger Osborne. “By the end of the nineteenth century Britain and Europe were heading not to a better society, but towards the catastrophe of mechanized warfare.”70
Two of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian writers were caught up in this illusion, their lives transform
ed in its wake. Much of their literary output would be a response to the assumptions that not only made the Great War possible, but added mightily to its destructive and vindictive power. The long shadows cast by this conflict do not fail to touch the borders of the Shire and of Narnia.
Such is the force of The Myth of Progress: even as its funeral oration was being written in the cabinet rooms of every major European capital, its power and promise would continue to deceive many. Yet not all. The day that Britain declared war on Germany, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was standing with a friend in Whitehall, looking out his window across St. James Park. It was dusk. As he watched the gas lamps below being lit, he grew somber.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”71
CHAPTER 2
THE LAST BATTLE
British historian C. V. Wedgwood, writing twenty years after the conclusion of the First World War, produced a sweeping survey of a conflict that created a human catastrophe for Europe. She drew her wounding observations to a close with an economy and power of language that has few rivals: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”1
Wedgwood’s account, however, was not about the deadly conflagration that had engulfed the Continent just a generation earlier. The war she had in mind was fought in the early seventeenth century. It has been called Europe’s last religious war: the Thirty Years War.
The Protestant Reformation not only shattered the religious unity of Europe: it set in motion a long period of sectarian violence that divided the Continent into rival political-religious empires. What began in 1618 as a conflict between Catholic and Protestant forces in the German province of Bohemia spiraled into a vast, Machiavellian struggle for dynastic power and real estate.
In a certain sense, the conflict anticipated the Great War. Although it could have remained a regional dispute, it sucked into its vortex most of the nations of Europe. Like the First World War, the Thirty Years War was breathtaking in its scope and destructive power. Like its twentieth-century counterpart, it resulted in startling numbers of casualties, caused massive physical devastation, disrupted local economies, and threatened the social fabric of European civilization. In modern-day Germany, where much of the fight occurred, the mortality rate—from combat, famine, and disease—was about 20 percent of the entire population.
The wretched memories of the conflict, real or imagined, never left the European mind. “The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars,” writes Peter Wilson in The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. “Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries.”2
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) not only ended the conflict, but sought to remove religion as a source of political strife. Westphalia set a new political foundation for the West, based on the sovereignty of the state, the right of non-interference in internal (religious) affairs, and the idea of international law to settle disputes. Pope Innocent X rejected Westphalia for limiting the authority of the Church, calling the treaty “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”3
The pope lost the argument, though, and the Treaty of Westphalia essentially created “a new charter for European relations” that survived up until the First World War.4 Under Westphalia, the secular interests of the state would set the course of international affairs. The nations of Europe had finally put an end to wars motivated by religious belief.
DUTY, PATRIOTISM, AND MUSCULAR RELIGION
Or had they? In fact, Westphalia failed to permanently tame the passions of sectarian religion. Almost from the outbreak of hostilities, the First World War became a conflict infused with religious themes. What might have remained a regional skirmish over ethnic self-determination became something like an apocalyptic contest between the forces of Good and Evil.
“Whatever the local agendas, Christians in all combatant nations—including the United States—entered wholeheartedly in the spirit of cosmic war,” writes Philip Jenkins in The Great and Holy War. “None found any difficulty in using fundamental tenets of the faith as warrants to justify war and mass destruction.”5 The zeal of Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the influential Bishop of London, was not unusual among the clergy of Great Britain: “I think the Church can best help the nation first of all by making it realize that it is engaged in a Holy War, and not be afraid of saying so,” he wrote. “Christ died on Good Friday for Freedom, Honor and Chivalry, and our boys are dying for the same things . . . MOBILIZE THE NATION FOR A HOLY WAR!”6
J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis became part of this mobilization. They were drafted as officers into the British army, trained for combat, and dispatched to France in 1916–17. As young boys, they had been sent away to English preparatory schools: Tolkien at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, while Lewis went to Cherbourg School in Great Malvern. These institutions were incubators of Victorian virtues: duty, honor, patriotism, and religion. Christianity and love of England went hand in hand, but the emphasis was on duty—duty to king and country—not on belief.7
England’s public school system reinforced these values in various ways, not least of which occurred on the soccer field. Sportsmanship was a means of maintaining a martial spirit, tethered to patriotic duty. “The sports field was an arena for feigned combat,” writes biographer John Garth. “In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means.”8 Sportsmanship was an expression of “muscular Christianity,” an assertive form of faith that reinforced the manlier civic virtues. “The sporting spirit, at its best,” according to one chaplain, “is the highest form of the Christian spirit attainable by men at our present stage of development.”9
Lacking interest or ability in athletics, Lewis rejected the martial culture of Malvern College, where he had begun studies in 1914. “These brutes of illiterate, ill-managed English prefects,” he wrote his father, “are always watching for an opportunity to drop upon you.”10 Lewis found sanctuary in the school library and threw himself into literature and the arts. “We shall not understand Jack,” writes biographer George Sayer, “unless we can appreciate his gift for being utterly absorbed in the imaginative world of a great writer, artist, or musician.”11 It was during this time that Lewis developed this gift, and it soon drew him into all kinds of works, from Dante’s Inferno to Norse mythologies to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. After he began reading Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek, he wrote his friend Arthur Greeves: “Although you don’t know Greek and don’t care for poetry, I cannot resist the temptation of telling you how stirring it is.”12
Tolkien, on the other hand, served as captain of the rugby team at King Edward’s, and he and many of its members became cadets in the recently established Officer Training Corps. It was at King Edward’s, where Latin and Greek formed the backbone of the curriculum, that Tolkien developed his love for languages. “It was just as the 1914 War burst upon me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong,” he wrote later. “But a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.”13 Tolkien became absorbed by Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language (and later was tutored by Wright). He read in the original Old English the warrior poem Beowulf, a medieval tale of “a man at war with the hostile world,” a theme that would define his literary career.14
Although both men read and enjoyed stories about war, about armies clashing in a great moral contest, they did not think of themselves as “holy crusaders” when the First World War got underway. Tolkien did not get swept up in the war fever of 1914. When tens of thousands of young men volunteered for service in the British Expeditionary Force, he continued his studies. In August 1916, shortly a
fter being deployed to France, Tolkien experienced the “universal weariness” of war and the “bitter disillusionment” of discovering that his military training had not prepared him for the conditions of actual combat.15
Some of Lewis’s journal entries during this time record his anxiety about being wounded in the war.16 Almost until the day of his enlistment, in fact, he hoped he could avoid military service.17 He remarked wryly to his father that one of the most serious consequences of the war was the survival of those least fit for survival. “All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are moral and physical weeds—a fact which does not promise favorably for the next generation.”18
Based on their letters and journals, it is certain that neither man saw himself as a potential martyr in a holy war, or even viewed the conflict as an opportunity for martial glory. What Tolkien and Lewis probably absorbed from their education was an understanding of England’s role in defending the ideals of Western civilization. Britain’s common-law tradition, judicial system, parliamentary government, and Bill of Rights were among the great contributions to human progress. Its alliances in Europe served not only British national interests, but helped to safeguard the peace and security of the Continent. “It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas,” writes Niall Ferguson. “Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since.”19 As one war veteran described it: “I suppose at no time did one live so much with a consciousness of the past.”20
British history made patriotic duty plausible to most Englishmen. “I could not pray for a finer death,” wrote J. Engall, serving on the Western Front with the 16th London Regiment, “and you my dear Mother and Father, will know that I died doing my duty to my God, my Country, and my King.”21 Whatever their other motivations, British soldiers in the First World War believed they were defending the values and institutions essential to human flourishing. “In Britain and France duty was associated with honor and loyalty and a fight for civilized and civilizing values, such as justice and dignity and freedom from tyranny,” explains historian Modris Eksteins. “Hence duty was not an abstract notion at the beginning of the war. It was a practical imperative.”22
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 Page 4