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

  In Tolkien and the Great War, biographer John Garth describes the scene as Tolkien’s turn for battle arrived on July 14, when his brigade was sent to reinforce the Ovillers campaign.49 The night sky was flush with bursting shells and flares. Small wooden crosses dotted the landscape. Along the way they encountered many wounded taken from the battlefield. “So it was on the approach to Ovillers that Tolkien first encountered the lost of the Somme,” Garth writes, “heralded by their stench, darkly hunched or prone, or hanging on the wire until a stab of brightness revealed them, the bloated and putrescent dead.”50

  The British line was a matrix of confusion and frustration. Phone lines running back to headquarters were easily tapped and could only be used as a last resort. Flags, flares, and lamps were also of limited use, since they attracted enemy fire. Most messages had to be sent by runners, who could be picked off by snipers. Thus, soldiers were effectively fighting in a “zone of mystery,” with no sense of the enemy’s movements or how to gain strategic advantage. “The job of the signaler was to shed some light on the mystery by helping set up a battlefield communications system and using it,” according to Garth. “In practice this was an almost hopeless task.”51

  Worst of all was the scene in and around the trenches. The bodies of dead soldiers lay everywhere: disfigured by shells, with woeful eyes or faces blown off entirely. The wounded moaned or wept with grief. Beyond the trenches, in No Man’s Land, was a landscape of lifeless desolation. Trees had been reduced to blackened sticks. The air was dense with smoke and the stench of explosives and unburied corpses. Grass and crops had been swallowed up by waves of mud.

  After a heavy rain, it was commonplace to see the bodies of soldiers lying facedown in pools or lakes of muddy water; once injured, their sixty-pound packs sealed their fate. A young British officer reported finding bodies of soldiers wounded on July 1 who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets around them, taken out their Bibles and died like that.”52 War correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs saw more than most. “Dead bodies were heaped there, buried and unburied,” he wrote. “Men dug into corruption when they tried to dig a trench. Men sat on dead bodies when they peered through their periscopes. They ate and slept with the stench of death in their nostrils.”53

  THE ANIMAL HORROR OF WAR

  Just before midnight on July14, 1916, Tolkien and the Lancashire Fusiliers were waiting in reserve as their comrades in the 7th Brigade launched the next assault at Ovillers-la-Boisselle. They were repelled. A second attack was planned for 2:00 a.m., and this time Tolkien’s battalion, with bayonets fixed, would lead it. But enemy machine-gun fire and barbed wire thwarted their assault. The battalions fell back for the night.54

  The next day they were at it again, exchanging bombs, hand grenades, and machine-gun fire with the enemy. The assault lasted all day. The ground, according to one survivor, was “torn up by shells and littered with dead bodies.”55 At sunset a white flag appeared at the German garrison at Ovillers: surrender. Tolkien, unharmed but physically and emotionally exhausted, had endured fifty hours of combat. Years later he described this period as “the animal horror of the life of active service.”56

  Upon returning to Bouzincourt, Tolkien found a terse and anxious note from G. B. Smith, explaining that Rob Gilson had been killed on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. “Do please stick to me, you and Christopher,” Smith wrote. “I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news.”57 Smith turned his grief into poetry, and wrote a tribute to Gilson:

  Let us tell quiet stories of kind eyes

  And placid brows where peace and learning sate:

  Of misty gardens under evening skies

  Where four would walk of old, with steps sedate. . . .

  And draw nigh unto us for memory’s sake,

  Because a look, a word, a deed, a friend,

  Are bound with cords that never a man may break,

  Unto his heart for ever, until the end.58

  Writing to Smith, Tolkien described the love he felt for their fallen friend, “which I only realize now, more and more daily, that he has gone.” Tolkien praised Gilson’s “holiness of courage, suffering, and sacrifice.” But he lamented the “bitter winnowing” of their number by the loss of their comrade. “I feel . . . immeasurably weaker and poorer now.” King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the birthplace of Tolkien’s TCBS, held a minute of silence to honor the forty-two graduates killed in 1916. Among their sad roster was Robert Gilson. He was twenty-two years old.

  “I do not know what is to be our move next or what is in store,” Tolkien wrote to Smith. “Rumor is as busy as the universal weariness of all this war allows it to be. I wish I could know where you are.”59 With a friend dead, others missing, and a horrible battle raging around him, we can only imagine the condition of Tolkien’s soul. Yet it brings to mind a moment in The Lord of the Rings, when Merry, cut off from the Fellowship, finds himself friendless and alone in the midst of their great quest. “Everyone he cared for had gone away into the gloom that hung over the distant eastern sky; and little hope at all was left in his heart that he would ever see any of them again.”60

  After just six days’ rest in Bouzincourt, Tolkien was sent back into the line. From that point on, writes John Garth, “he lived almost constantly in a dugout.”61 The Fusiliers rehearsed for an attack on Regina Trench, the longest trench in the German line. Although it was of dubious strategic value, it already had cost the lives of many thousands of men. Canadian troops had seized and then lost a section of the trench. Another attack had failed, leaving many dead and wounded. Like so many other battles in the war, the campaign had become an ordeal of attrition.

  Tolkien’s battalion was ready to begin their attack on the afternoon of October 19, 1916. But heavy rains delayed the assault for forty-eight hours. Weariness and anxiety were surely taking their toll on Tolkien and the Fusiliers as they imagined climbing out of their dugouts and into the blood and smoke and shelling of No Man’s Land. “The fifteen minutes before ‘going over’ have a peculiar eeriness all their own,” wrote a Scottish private. “As the zero hour approaches . . . we are left with nothing to take our minds off the dragging minutes.”62 Tolkien captured moments like this in The Lord of the Rings, where he most often seems to identify with the plight of the hobbits:

  Now he was one small soldier in a city preparing for a great assault, clad in the proud but somber manner of the Tower of the Guard. In some other time and place Pippin might have been pleased with his new array, but he knew now that he was taking part in no play; he was in deadly earnest the servant of a grim master in the greatest peril.63

  What sustained Tolkien and his fellow soldiers? “The honor of my battalion and its opinion of me,” wrote one officer. “These are now my sustaining motives in the game of war.”64 The resolve and discipline of British troops in the face of massive casualties during the battle remains one of the most remarkable facts of the First World War. “None could help thinking of what the next few hours would bring,” wrote a soldier. “One minute’s anguish and then, once in the ranks, faces became calm and serene, a kind of gravity falling upon them, while on each could be read the determination and expectation of victory.”65

  Finally, just after noon on October 21, the first two waves of infantrymen scrambled from their narrow trenches, followed by Tolkien’s signalers. Success: at 12:20 p.m., Tolkien, who was running the signals operation, told brigade headquarters that scores of Germans were surrendering. His division alone captured seven hundred German soldiers.

  Yet their victory was not without cost: at least 41 Fusiliers were dead or missing, another 117 were wounded, many grievously. Many in Tolkien’s division were cut down by their own artillery, casualties of the inescapable fog of war. Rev. Mervyn Evers, the battalion chaplain, appeared the next day, covered in blood. He had spent the entire night in No Man’s Land, enduring German artillery fire and fierce cold, tending the wounded and comforting the dying.66

/>   A week later Tolkien’s battalion was on a train to Ypres, the scene of some of the most devastating battles of the war. Yet Tolkien was not with them; he was stricken with “trench fever,” a bacterium that entered the bloodstream through lice. He was transported to an officers’ hospital to recover. Chronic ill health sent him back to England on November 8, 1916, to recuperate at Birmingham University’s wartime hospital.

  A few weeks later, in December 1916, Tolkien received another sad letter, this time from Christopher Wiseman, his friend who survived the Battle of Jutland. In what should have been a safe zone, G. B. Smith was hit by a German shell fragment while walking along a road in the village of Souastre, north of Bouzincourt. An infection set in, and four days later he was dead.

  It was a grievous blow. Smith had begun to write poetry during the war and shared it with Tolkien whenever he could. To honor his friend’s memory, Tolkien edited a collection of his poems after the war and published them under the title Spring Harvest. In the foreword to the book, Tolkien noted that poems such as “The Burial of Sophocles” were written under fire: “The final version was sent to me from the trenches.” Shortly before his death, Smith had written to Tolkien with a sense of foreboding: “May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say so long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.”67

  A VISION OF MORDOR

  Mostly confined to a sickbed in England, Tolkien faced a grim accounting. Gilson and Smith were dead. So was Ralph Stuart Payton, another member of the TCBS. He, too, had fought at the Somme. He was killed in action on July 22, 1916, his body never identified. Gone also was Thomas Kenneth “Tea Cake” Barnsley, who was in the debating society with Tolkien. He served as a captain in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was buried alive by a trench mortar, escaped—only to be killed in action near Ypres in June 1917.

  Trench fever probably spared Tolkien’s life. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers went back into action on May 27, 1918, near the River Aisne, and sustained enormous casualties. The entire battalion was presumed dead or taken prisoner.

  Still recovering from his illness, Tolkien was nevertheless strong enough to begin sketching out the foundation for his epic story. He of course retained his love of medieval literature, especially the themes of beauty and mortality in works such as Beowulf. Years later, in his groundbreaking essay, “On Translating Beowulf,” Tolkien offered an insight into the poignant vision of the work that so absorbed him: “The poet who spoke these words saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life, until the hour of fate when all things should perish.”68

  Whatever else informed Tolkien’s literary vision, we cannot overlook the backdrop of war: the life-and-death struggle that harasses every front-line soldier, the “animal horror” of trench warfare, the staggering desolation of No Man’s Land.69 The scenes at the Battle of the Somme, especially the early days of slaughter and futility, could not fail to leave their mark on the human conscience. Might Tolkien have had in mind his comrades, those who fell at the Somme, when he described the Siege of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings?

  Yet their Captain cared not greatly what they did or how many might be slain: their purpose was only to test the strength of the defense and to keep the men of Gondor busy in many places. All before the walls on either side of the Gate the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet still driven as by a madness more and more came up.70

  Indeed, it would be remarkable if the destruction Tolkien witnessed along the Western Front did not find expression in his creative works. “The horror of these landscapes is that they are not naturally produced but are a product of man’s destructive misuse of technology,” writes Nancy Marie Ott. “Battlefields like this simply did not exist before World War I.”71

  Thus on the desolate path to Mordor we encounter “dead grasses and rotting reeds” that “loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.”72 We see “a land defiled, diseased beyond healing.”73 We watch Sam Gamgee, during the passage through the marshes, catch his foot and fall on his hands, “which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mire.” Looking intently into the glazed and grimy muck, he is startled by what he finally sees. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!” Gollum laughed. “The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,” he cackled.74

  War historian Martin Gilbert, in a chance interview with Tolkien at Oxford in the 1960s, spoke with him about his experience at the Battle of the Somme. “Tolkien remembered, as vividly as if it were yesterday, the constant danger of German artillery shells, ranging throughout the area, falling with their screech and roar, and clouds of earth and mud, and the fearful cries of men who had been hit.”75 Gilbert, who wrote a definitive account of the Somme offensive, noted that Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes matches precisely the macabre experience of the soldiers in that battle: “Many soldiers on the Somme had been confronted by corpses, often decaying in the mud, that had lain undisturbed, except by the bombardment, for days, weeks and even months.”76

  In a letter to L. W. Forster, written in December 1960, Tolkien confirmed the influence of the war on his story, at least in his description of its bleak landscapes: “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”77

  THE COURAGE OF QUITE SMALL PEOPLE

  Not all Tolkien’s war experiences, however, produced such dark narratives. In a letter to W. H. Auden, he explained how the idea for The Hobbit—the prequel to The Lord of the Rings—first came into his mind. It happened years after the war, after he had become Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, while he was sitting and grading student papers. “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. . . . Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like.”78

  We don’t know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering in that dreary “hole in the ground,” the front-line trench.

  Most of the members of the British Expeditionary Force were “citizen soldiers,” drawn largely from the working classes. Unlike the French, Italian, Russian, and German armies, the BEF did not experience a large-scale collapse in discipline or morale.79 Even during the most intensive campaigns along the Western Front, they showed a “remarkable resilience” relative to other armies.80 The change in character that comes over Sam Gamgee was probably not unlike the transformation that Tolkien must have witnessed among many of his fellow soldiers in battle: “But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.”81

  If this was the character of the British soldier in the Great War, then it explains the admiration of Tolkien and many others over the years. As John Keegan concludes in The Face of Battle: “The British Expeditionary Force of 1916 was one of the most remarkable and admirable military formations ever to have taken the field.”82 In his magisterial work, The World Crisis, Winston Churchill extolled the qualities of the British army with his usual eloquence: “Unconquerable except by death . . . they set up a monument of native virtue which will command the wonder, the reverence and the gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among men.”83 Even Sir Philip Gibbs, who became severely critical of military leadership, confessed his astonishment at the valor of British troops, praising the “individual
courage beyond the normal laws of human nature as I thought I knew them once.”84

  Historians still debate the ultimate achievement of these soldiers, and the causes for which they fought. Were they merely fodder for a vast and merciless military machine that ravaged Europe to no good end? Or did they play a vital role in halting German aggression and preventing the dominance of a brutal and oppressive juggernaut over the Continent? Whatever Tolkien thought about these questions, he was careful never to demean the significance of the soldier at his post: “I have always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” The hobbits were made small, he explained, “to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’ ”85

  Tolkien the soldier lived among these “ordinary men,” fought alongside them, witnessed their courage under fire, joked with them, mourned with them, and watched them die. Thus the “small people” who fought and suffered in the Great War helped inspire the creation of the unlikely heroes in Tolkien’s greatest imaginative work. Like the soldiers in that war, the homely hobbits could not have perceived how the fate of nations depended upon their stubborn devotion to duty.