At the start of the battle, more than 140,000 German troops, supported by 1,200 artillery guns, began pounding French fortifications. The eight-mile sector of the German lines “erupted into a blaze of artillery the likes of which the world had never seen.”4 Woods were converted to stumps and craters. A French soldier described the scene thus: “Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club.”5
By the end of April, casualties at Verdun totaled 133,000 for the French and 120,000 for the Germans—with no end in sight. In the first week of June, the Germans turned their sights on Fort Vaux, and a savage fight for the outpost began. “It is maddening,” wrote a French soldier. “One sees . . . a continuous cloud of smoke everywhere. Trees leap into the air like wisps of straw; it is an unheard-of spectacle.”6 After a heroic defense, the French commander surrendered only because his men were literally dying of thirst.7 “Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing,” wrote a French lieutenant in his diary at Verdun. “Hell cannot be so terrible.”8 The hellish campaign at Verdun would drag on until December 1916.
LEAVING THE LONELY ISLE
News of these battles, of their ferocity and destructiveness, was in the air as twenty-four-year-old Tolkien disembarked on June 4, 1916. Trained as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, his preparation could hardly have equipped him for the realities that lay ahead. He seemed to sense as much, for he did not expect to return home alive. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien recalled. “Parting from my wife then . . . it was like a death.”9
As he crossed the English Channel, Tolkien gazed back at his island home and turned his thoughts into poetry.10 His short poem, “The Lonely Isle,” suggests his deep sadness as his familiar world slipped further and further from sight:
Down the great wastes and in 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!11
It is easy to imagine Tolkien, the untested soldier, drawing on this moment of separation when he described scenes of parting in The Lord of the Rings. Recall Frodo’s dark realization as he prepares to leave the Shire: “This would mean exile, a flight from danger to danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone. . . . But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.”12
As we’ve seen, there was an immense feeling of patriotic duty as Britain entered the conflict, a desire to “do one’s bit” for King and Country. “I have implicit confidence in you, my soldiers,” King George told the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914. “Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done.”13 Droves of men responded to the call with a kind of “intense, almost mystical patriotism.”14
Relying on an all-volunteer military, Lord Kitchener, Secretary for War, initially called for another one hundred thousand men to bolster the regular army. But young men flooded recruitment offices so that by the spring of 1915 there were six hundred thousand additional men under arms. The Birmingham Daily Post, Tolkien’s hometown paper, left no doubt about the obligation of the hour: “Patriotism insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation.”15 As Tolkien described the mood: “In those days, chaps signed up or were scorned publicly.”16
Men enlisted together, forming “Pals’ Battalions” drawn from their networks of families, friendships, and work relationships. “It is a story of a spontaneous and genuinely popular mass movement which has no counterpart in the modern, English-speaking world,” writes John Keegan in The Face of Battle, “and perhaps could have none outside of its own time and place.”17
At the beginning of 1916, there were nearly a million British troops on the Continent, and the number was increasing by about one hundred thousand every month. A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, marveled at the “really astonishing” numbers of volunteers. “The revelation has been the outpouring of service both of men and women from the heart of a nation which its enemies thought was lost in comfort and wrapped in ignoble ease.”18 Yet Britain still relied on an all-volunteer army, and the numbers were insufficient to meet the demands of the war. Compared to the large continental armies of Germany and France, the British Expeditionary Force in early 1916 was still modest in size. German Kaiser Wilhelm II called the British army “contemptibly small.”
Most importantly, twenty-two months of carnage had produced a military stalemate along the Western Front. The British government was determined to tilt the balance of forces. On January 27, 1916, Parliament passed the Military Service Act, introducing conscription to Britain for the first time. All men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were required to enlist. “It was a nasty cleft to be in,” Tolkien wrote many years later, “especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”19
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE TRENCHES
By the summer of 1916, the initial enthusiasm for war was fading. More than two hundred thousand British soldiers now lay dead, and another three hundred thousand wounded.20 Soldiers kept on fighting—there was a remarkable loyalty among recruits of all ranks—but there was also a deepening sobriety, a grim determination to hold on. Abel Ferry lost not only his zeal for battle, but many of his cherished convictions: “Idealism is dupery,” he wrote in 1916. “The world belongs to those who don’t believe in ideas.”21 TCBS member Rob Gilson had joined the Cambridgeshire Battalion as a second lieutenant. Like Tolkien, he was sent to the Western Front, where he encountered conditions previously unimaginable. “I could almost cry sometimes at the universal mud,” he wrote, “and the utter impossibility of escaping from it.”22
What Gilson described was the defining, iconic symbol of the war: the trench. For the typical British soldier, life in these elaborate ditches was a quagmire of cold, wet, rat-infested squalor. The trenches were deep enough to shelter a soldier and narrow enough to avoid direct hits from artillery fire. Every few yards a trench zigzagged, to limit the damage from mortar or machine-gun attacks. Trench walls, supported by sandbags, were in a constant state of decay. Trench floors, even if covered with wooden duckboards, filled up with water during heavy rains. “In two-and-a-half miles of trench which I waded yesterday,” wrote Wilfred Owen to his mother, “there was not one inch of dry ground.”23
Rats roamed about at will. Gorging themselves on human remains, some were the size of a cat. Disgusted and harassed by them, soldiers would shoot them, bayonet them, or club them to death. “We borrowed a large cat and shut it up at night to exterminate them, and found the place empty next morning,” recorded a soldier in his diary. “The rats must have eaten it up, bones, fur, and all, and dragged it to their holes.”24
As bad as the water, mud, rats, roaches, and lice was the smell: the stench of decaying flesh, human and animal, seemed to cover everything. Snipers, grenades, random shell fire, untreated wounds, disease—any number of causes made death, and the smell of death, a constant presence for soldiers on the front line. Writes historian John Keegan: “You could smell the front line miles before you could see it.”25
The trenches provided the setting for much of the suffering and lethality of the war. They formed a base of operations for each side’s military, offering a measure of protection for soldiers and creating a demarcation line behind which the heavy guns were nested. “Millions of men for months occupied almost unchanging positions within close range of the enemy,” explains historian Max Hastings. “Rigorous discipline became necessary to avoid exposing even an inch of flesh.”26
During an assault, shells of death flew overhead in both directions, eventually finding their mark. “It exploded, and a cloud of black reek went up,” wrote a British captain during an assault on a trench line. The explosion, he exp
lained, threw up the earth and buried two or more soldiers alive. “You dug furiously. . . . At last you get them out, three dead, grey muddy masses, and one more jabbering live one. Then another shell falls and more are buried.”27
No soldier, especially one with Tolkien’s literary cast of mind, could ever forget the experience. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Tolkien already had discovered that he was drawn to ancient legends and the languages in which they were embedded. Not even the demands of active combat could completely distract him from his passion. He began writing bits and pieces of the legends that would form the basis of his epic trilogy: “The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918—when time allowed.”28
Thus the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings possess a grim authenticity. When Tolkien describes the Siege of Gondor—where the “fires leaped up” and “great engines crawled across the field” and the ground “was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain”—he delivers the realism of the war veteran. “Busy as ants hurrying orcs were digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring, just out of bowshot from the walls,” he wrote in The Return of the King. “And soon yet more companies of the enemy were swiftly setting up, each behind the cover of a trench, great engines for the casting of missiles.”29
SLAUGHTER AT THE SOMME
In an effort to take pressure off the French forces and achieve a breakthrough in the conflict, the British conceived of a major offensive of their own, to begin in the summer of 1916. Winston Churchill, who had just returned to the Western Front as a battalion commander, warned the House of Commons against “futile offensives” that would kill thousands of young men overnight. Nevertheless, plans were drawn up for a renewed attack that would permanently alter Tolkien’s life, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of English soldiers: the Battle of the Somme.
The weather on the morning of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme offensive, “was of the kind commonly called heavenly.” Below, however, beginning at 7:00 a.m., British aircraft and artillery were raining down hell on German positions along the river. In just over an hour, nearly a quarter of a million shells—about thirty-five hundred shells a minute—were fired at the Germans. The roar was so loud that it was heard in North London, nearly two hundred miles away.
The British, in fact, had been pounding their targets for a week with heavy artillery. Soldiers were assured that this last burst of firepower would destroy what was left of the German wire, obliterate the deepest dugouts, and severely compromise German artillery power. Crossing No Man’s Land, that dreadful death zone stretching between the opposing enemy trenches, would be a song. “You will be able to get over the top with a walking stick,” one battalion was told, “you will not need rifles.”30
At 7:30 a.m., to the sound of whistles, drums, and bagpipes, nearly one hundred thousand British troops climbed out of their trenches and attacked along the entire fourteen-mile front. They were confident of victory, even exuberant.
What they did not know was that the bombardment had not penetrated most of the German dugouts, or destroyed the wire, or knocked out the German heavy artillery. What they did not suspect was that they were “plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination.”31 Hundreds of German field guns and howitzers were turned on the advancing British troops, with devastating effect. “When we started to fire we just had to load and reload,” said a German machine-gunner. “They went down in their hundreds. We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”32
Before the sun sank beyond the grey banks of the River Somme, 19,420 British soldiers—Lloyd George called them “the choicest and best of our young manhood”—lay dead.33 Most were killed in the first hour of the attack, many within the first minutes. Another 40,000 were wounded. Many battalions endured casualty rates (dead and wounded) of over 50 percent. Thus, July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, marks the deadliest single day in British military history. “The agony of war took its toll on the Somme in full measure,” writes Martin Gilbert in The Somme. “The heroism and horror of war were seen there without disguise, unembellished and unadorned.”34
The Somme offensive would rage, inconclusively, until November 16—nearly five months of bloodletting that claimed more than 1.2 million dead and wounded. And to what end? “In offensive terms, the advance had achieved nothing,” concludes John Keegan. “Most of the dead were killed on ground the British held before the advance began.”35 Winston Churchill, who was on the front lines in 1916 as a lieutenant colonel, saw “a welter of slaughter” from beginning to end. “No strategic advantage of any kind had been gained.”36 One commanding officer reported stoically: “It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valor, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”37
Among the dead was TCBS member Rob Gilson. Two nights before he was killed, Gilson had written home: “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.”38
Though he entered the war with great anxiety over his own capacities under the stress of battle, Gilson distinguished himself in his final moments. When his commanding officer was killed, Gilson took over and led his men “perfectly calmly and confidently” into No Man’s Land.39 His friend could not have been far from Tolkien’s thoughts when, in The Lord of the Rings, he described as “curiously tough” the hobbits of the Shire. “They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they . . . could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.”40
INTO THE LINE
News of Gilson’s death did not reach Tolkien for several weeks. As the battalion signals officer of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien’s job was to maintain communication between the army staff directing the battle and the officers in the field. His tools included flares, signal lights, carrier pigeons, runners, and telephones. His was a vital link in the chain of command, since the information gathered in the field would direct artillery fire and deploy—or withdraw—troops as needed. Breakdowns in communication could cost hundreds, even thousands, of lives.
In the days before the Somme offensive, Tolkien and the eight hundred men of his Fusiliers unit were held back in a battle-ready support role, perhaps thirteen miles from the front. But on July 3, the third day of the battle, they headed for Bouzincourt, a village just three miles behind the line. Once they arrived, soldiers occupied every house, barn, cellar, and orchard.41
In an earlier war, the men would have been at a safe enough distance from the fighting to play a game of cricket. But not in this war with its new technologies of destruction. Chief among them was artillery, comprised of a wide variety of long-range weapons: field artillery, made up of 18-pounder guns and 4.5-inch howitzers, which could fire small shrapnel or high explosives to a range of six thousand yards; medium artillery, comprised of 60-pounder guns that could send explosive shells ten thousand yards; and trench mortars, which could lob four-inch bombs from one trench to another across No Man’s Land.42 Artillery carried the advantage not only of distance but of speed: thanks to hydraulic mechanisms and timing devices, the “shells” could be delivered to the enemy more rapidly, accurately, and for longer periods than anything ever seen in warfare. “For the first time in history, and from the beginning of the war to the end, artillery dominated,” writes G. J. Meyer. “It did more killing between 1914 and 1918 than any other weapon.”43
As Tolkien lay in a hut, probably reading letters from his wife, a German field gun bombarded the village. Tolkien, on the Western Front and caught up in one of the deadliest exchanges of the war, came under fire for the first time in his life.
How might the young soldier have drawn on this moment to describe the enormity of war in
The Lord of the Rings? “This is no longer a bickering at the fords, raiding from Ithilien and from Anorien, ambushing and pillaging,” says Beregond, a soldier in Gondor’s army. “This is a great war long planned, and we are but one piece in it, whatever pride may say.”44 Could this same moment have informed the anguish of Frodo Baggins after leaving the Shire and facing the Black Riders? “In that lonely place Frodo for the first time fully realized his homelessness and danger,” Tolkien wrote. “He wished bitterly that his fortune had left him in the quiet and beloved Shire. He stared down at the hateful Road, leading back westward—to his home.”45
Reflecting on his experiences years later, Tolkien acknowledged that his taste for fantasy was “quickened to full life by war” and that “the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914–18 war.”46 Much of the “early parts” of his epic, he explained, were “done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”47 In other words, Tolkien had begun to lay the foundation for his war trilogy.
The immediate challenge, though, was to stay alive. “Tolkien and his signalers were always vulnerable,” explains Martin Gilbert. The village of Bouzincourt avoided much of the barrage, but wounded men from other areas of the front, many of them horribly mutilated, arrived by the hundreds. Members of Tolkien’s battalion began digging graves.
Tolkien was especially anxious over the fate of two of his friends from the TCBS. He knew that Gilson was in the thick of the fighting on July 1, but nothing else. Nor did he know what had happened to Geoffrey Smith, another member of his inner circle. Remarkably, Smith appeared in Bouzincourt on July 6, alive and unharmed. Tolkien was overcome with joy, and the two met as often as they could amid the clamor of activity. They walked together in a field of poppies, strangely untouched by mortar fire, and talked about poetry, the war, and the future. The next day Smith’s company, the Salford Pals, left for the trenches to support the British assault on Ovillers, a German stronghold.48
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 7