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

  Once the United States entered the war against Germany, American clergymen became as zealous as their British counterparts. For many, the German chancellor represented a unique embodiment of moral evil.

  George Holley Gilbert, a Congregational minister, saw “a thoroughly militarized Christianity, like that of the Kaiser, as the lowest and most harmful religion ever developed on earth.”56 Methodist bishop Richard Cooke explained that “the real reason for the war” was “to vindicate God Almighty against the brutal philosophy of damned men.”57 Even academics such as James Day, chancellor at Syracuse University, could not resist using religious language to condemn German militarism. “It would be a blessing,” he said, “if we could turn the beast of Berlin over to God and say, ‘Lord, inflict violent wrath upon this creature.’ ”58

  POLITICAL AND SPIRITUAL REDEMPTION

  A holy war against an unholy power: the result, according to the Allied clergy, would be nothing less than the political and spiritual rebirth of Western culture. The autocracies and petty kingdoms of Europe would give way to the self-governing ideals of liberal democracy. Materialism would yield to the spiritual values of Christianity.

  Some churchmen viewed the war as God’s verdict on the growing secularism and materialism of the West. “Perhaps God has allowed us to pull down the temple of modern civilization over our heads,” explained Percy Dearmer, “in order that the survivors may be cured of the modern habit of regarding man as a calculating machine.”59 For others, the war would propel the steady evolution of democratic societies.

  Returning from a diplomatic mission to Russia in 1917, former U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root went on a nationwide lecture tour, telling audiences that America was destined to lead “the upward progress of humanity along the pathway of civilization to a true Christian life.”60 David Cairns, professor of apologetics at Aberdeen, suggested that a new era of international peace was dawning. “We cannot see the world-situation tonight, or indeed at any time, unless we dream a little about the future,” he said. “I am willing to dream that we are going to have not only a concert of Europe, but a concert of the world for a great common end.”61

  Advocates of the social gospel were especially hopeful: they imagined the war as a cleansing experience, a means to purge entire societies of their sub-Christian loyalties. An Allied victory would ensure a progressive future for the United States and Europe. Lyman Abbott, one of the best-known liberal theologians of his day, envisioned “progressive redemption” as a result of the war. Americans were working hard “to banish those crimes against humanity from our civilization,” he said, and to bring about “the triumph for Christianity such as the world has never before known.”62

  In The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, historian Richard Gamble argues that progressive clergy were particularly prone to convert the conflict into a culturally and spiritually transformative event. “They seized upon the war as an opportunity to reconstruct the churches, America, and the world according to the imperatives of the social gospel,” he writes. “Their peacetime crusade became a wartime crusade.”63

  The expectation of widespread cultural renewal was broadcast from America’s “bully pulpit” on January 8, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points for the establishment of global peace and security after the war. At the moral center of Wilson’s vision was a global political community based on trust and mutual regard: the diplomatic application of the Golden Rule.

  Almost without exception, church leaders became tireless evangelists for Wilson’s gospel of peaceful internationalism. “The world that existed before the War has disappeared forever,” declared John Mott. “For the world it is a new birth, a great day of God such as comes only once in 100 or 1,000 years.”64 Joseph Fort Newton, a famous minister at London’s City Temple, likewise discerned “a new chapter in the social, political, intellectual and spiritual life of mankind.”

  In The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (1918), Newton likened the war to the Christian Crusades of medieval Europe. Just as the earlier crusaders had unified Europe, he predicted, “so this, the greatest humanitarian crusade in history, will unify the world.” The advance of humankind would proceed “slowly, surely, inevitably” as national hatreds and sectarian pettiness “yield to the pressure of world-obligation and community of interest.” In the end, Newton assured his readers, “men will think in terms of one humanity and one Christianity.”65

  The attainment of such a world, of course, depended on the utter defeat and humiliation of the enemy. There could be no room for compromise or limited objectives. The Christmas truce along the Western Front in December 1914 would never be duplicated. All this helps explain the opposition of many church leaders to peace proposals that would have left Germany undefeated and unpunished. Concludes Gamble: “It was a war for absolutes that combined the armies of heaven and earth into the ultimate battle.”66

  Here, then, is one of the most striking effects of the Myth of Progress. Even war itself—a process inherently destructive to human life and human societies—was believed to have regenerative properties. The assumption of religious leaders in England and the United States was that war would advance the ideals of Christianity and democracy. More than that, it would give birth to an epoch of peace and righteousness: the “last battle” before the dawn of a new world. Whatever the religious beliefs of the combatants, the secular idealism of the Myth was driving attitudes and expectations about the conflict’s outcome.

  The problem, of course, was that none of these holy predictions would come to pass. The gulf between the prophecies of the clergymen and the realities of the conflict would overshadow many souls in the postwar generation. Paul Bull, a minister and former chaplain, spoke for many of them: “The Age of Progress ends in a barbarism such as shocks a savage. The Age of Reason ends in a delirium of madness.”67

  FAITH IN THE TRENCHES

  Two young soldiers, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, managed to survive this delirium with their souls intact. It is not easy to say how the temper of the times shaped their attitudes as they went off to war; no person fully escapes the assumptions of his age. Nevertheless, neither man ever expressed the crusader mind-set, much less the apocalyptic views of the clergy. Their goals were much more practical and earthly: to fight honorably, survive the trenches intact, and pick up their academic careers where the war had interrupted them. “Before I went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war,” wrote Lewis years later. “In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign.”68

  In this, Tolkien and Lewis probably shared the sentiments of the majority of their fellow soldiers.69 Many were outraged by German atrocities and loathed the idea of German hegemony in Europe. Yet there is little evidence that the ordinary soldier was animated by intense religious idealism. A story circulated in France, for example, about a clergyman in a carriage of men on their way to the front line. He cheerfully asks them, “So, you are going to fight God’s war?” After getting no reply, he repeats the question. “Don’t you believe in God’s war?” A soldier looks at him wearily and replies: “Sir, hadn’t you better keep your poor Friend out of this bloody mess?”70

  Unfortunately for the Church of England, many chaplains were out of sight and apparently out of touch during the war. Ordered to remain safely behind the lines, at hospitals or field ambulances, they often seemed incapable of relating to the men fighting for survival.

  “The key to the whole thing,” wrote Theodore Hardy, a chaplain who later won the Victoria Cross, was for ministers to serve in the combat zone: “If you stay back, you are wasting your time. Men will forgive anything but lack of courage.” Most Protestant ministers, however, followed orders and avoided the front. “There is only one Front here and few Chaplains ever get there, an
d then not during engagements,” complained David Railton. “It is a mistake on the part of the authorities which will cost the Church dearly.”71

  Perhaps it did. Many Anglican chaplains worked courageously to serve the men under their care. Of the two thousand Anglican clergy attached to the British army at the time of the Armistice, eighty-eight died in battle, while four were awarded the Victoria Cross.72 Nevertheless, war poet Robert Graves—his cynicism aside—seemed to capture a common perception of clerical cowardice and hypocrisy: “If they had shown one-tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival.”73 Despite great hopes to the contrary, no widespread revival occurred.74

  For most men, it seems, God remained in the backdrop of the conflict, but not wholly absent. The oft-quoted critique by Graves—“hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind”—seems a self-serving projection of his own militant atheism.75 As historian Richard Schweitzer argues in The Cross and the Trenches, a strong percentage of soldiers referred to religious belief in their letters and diaries, suggesting genuine piety.76 Perhaps the observation of a Scottish officer was closer to the mark: “The religion of ninety percent of the men at the front is not distinctively Christian,” he wrote, “but a religion of patriotism and of valor, tinged with chivalry, and the best merely colored with sentiment and emotion borrowed from Christianity.”77

  CHASTENED BY WAR

  On the eve of the Battle of the Somme, Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, wrote to his wife: “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.”78 Haig was convinced that his soldiers shared his simple faith and were similarly inspired to bear the sufferings required to prevail.79 Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister who fought at Ypres in May 1916, was not prone to expressions of sectarian zeal. Nevertheless, he wrote to his mother: “Many of us could never stand the strain and endure the horrors which we see every day, if we did not feel that this was more than a war—a Crusade. I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr.”80

  Did the experience of war transform Tolkien and Lewis into faith-based crusaders? Tolkien entered the war a devout Catholic, Lewis a lapsed Anglican and an atheist (his turn toward Christianity did not occur until much later). They shared a basic patriotism and sense of duty to King and Country, yet they were reluctant recruits into the war effort. As authors they sought to recover the romantic and mythic traditions based on the struggle between good and evil. But they declined to sanctify war as a divine undertaking. Rather, the characters in their works often display a great ambivalence toward conflict.

  In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond grows somber as he reflects on the history of the wars that have ravaged his world. He has lived long enough to know that, despite hopes to the contrary, the forces of evil would not be eradicated by the next battle: “I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.”81 Tolkien denied that his Lord of the Rings was “just a plain fight between Good and Evil,” or that his protagonists represent untainted goodness. “But in any case this is a tale about war,” he wrote, “and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other.”82

  Lewis occasionally poked fun at his characters, such as Reepicheep in the Narnia series, for their bravado: “For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”83 In his science fiction trilogy, he created a mad Anglican parson, Mr. Straik, who naively endorses an earthly (and diabolical) attempt to realize the kingdom of God. “It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” intones Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”84 Straik might well have been modeled on any number of WWI ministers enchanted by the prospects of spiritual revival.

  Indeed, what sets their works apart is how they avoid the triumphalism of the holy warrior. Tolkien deliberately submerged the Christian elements of his story, making even the idea of God only a suggestive aspect of the narrative. “Even when I was far away,” says Gandalf, “there has never been a day when the Shire has not been guarded by watchful eyes.”85 Lewis was much more explicit about the biblical themes that frame his work. But even his protagonists—obedient to a Calling larger than themselves—are nonetheless flawed, fearful, and self-doubting. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick,” wrote Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. “But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster and aimed a slash of sword at its side.”86

  As we’ll see, the Christian faith of Tolkien and Lewis offered them a moral vantage point from which to grapple with the meaning of war. Their personal taste of combat, with all its troubling ambiguities, checked the impulse toward self-righteousness. Surely the daily routine of war, its moments of fear, boredom, exhaustion, hardship, and horror, saved them from ever romanticizing the experience. As Lewis wrote, many years after his wartime service:

  For let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love.87

  Nevertheless, belief in the existence of a moral order to the universe helped these authors to confront the human predicament: the diabolical and deeply rooted challenges to justice and peace in our world. Moreover, the inexpressible experience of war gave them a special empathy for the person who is asked to risk all for a noble cause. More often than not, their characters display an unexpected humility, a reticence about combat that can be overcome only by the prospect of a gathering storm of Evil.

  Thus, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, we follow Frodo Baggins in near-constant peril as he pursues his mission as a foot soldier in a great war. We see his fear as well as his determination to overcome it and remain true to his quest: “There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow,” Tolkien wrote. “He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.”88

  CHAPTER 3

  IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED A HOBBIT

  A few days before Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien set off for the Western Front in France, the greatest sea battle of the First World War began. On June 1, 1916, the British Grand Fleet challenged the German Navy in the North Sea. Known as the Battle of Jutland, a British force of twenty-eight battleships, nine battle cruisers, thirty-four light cruisers, and eighty destroyers clashed with twenty-four German battleships, five battle cruisers, eleven light cruisers, and sixty-three destroyers. It was a fearsome display of modern naval power.

  British petty officer Ernest Francis, a gunner’s mate aboard the battle cruiser Queen Mary, jumped overboard after his ship was blown out of the water. “I struck away from the ship as hard as I could and must have covered nearly fifty yards when there was a big smash,” he wrote. “And coming behind me I heard a rush of water, which looked very like surf breaking on a beach and I realized it was the suction or backwash from the ship which had just gone.”1 The Queen Mary sank in ninety seconds, taking most of its thousand-man crew with her.

  Given the casualties on both sides, there seemed to be no clear victor; citizens and soldiers alike were left wondering whether to celebrate a victory or mourn an inglorious defeat. “The one indisputable fact,” said a nurse at a London hospital, “was that hundreds of young men, many of them midshipmen only just in their t
eens, had gone down without hope of rescue or understanding of the issues to a cold, anonymous grave.”2 The losses were indeed devastating: a total of 6,097 British sailors perished at sea, compared to 2,551 Germans.

  Among those caught up in the battle was Christopher Wiseman, a member of Tolkien’s “Tea Club and Barrovian Society,” or TCBS, a semi-secret society of friends who first met in 1911 at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Though others were included, its core members were Tolkien, Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. All of them, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, were drawn into the First World War as soldiers. Tolkien’s circle shared a love of literature and a powerful desire to leave their mark on the world. Wiseman must have left his mark on Tolkien, because he named his son, Christopher, after him.

  Before being sent off to war, members of the TCBS held a “Council” meeting at Wiseman’s house in London, an exalted title borrowed, no doubt, from the diplomatic jargon of the day. They talked late into the night, sharing with one another their deepest convictions and aspirations. Given their evident loyalty to one another throughout the war years, they must have vowed to preserve their fellowship in whatever way they could. Tolkien later said it was at this moment that he first became aware of “the hopes and ambitions” that would propel him throughout his life.3

  At about the same time that Tolkien enlisted in the British Expeditionary Force, Wiseman had joined the Navy and was assigned to the HMS Superb, part of the British Grand Fleet during the Battle of Jutland. He survived the encounter.

  Meanwhile, the Germans staged another major assault at Verdun, a French outpost along the River Meuse, about 150 miles east of Paris. The Battle of Verdun—the longest battle of the war—had already been raging for fifteen weeks. Launched on February 21, 1916, it was an attempt to “bleed France white” by attacking a strategic fortress town and luring the French army into a fatal defensive. If successful, the assault would have knocked France out of the war and forced Britain to go it alone.