Perhaps this was Tolkien’s quiet way of suggesting that we may, in the end, owe more to these forgotten dead than our modern temperament allows. “That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall,” advises Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. “For there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that are not wholly vain.”86
CHAPTER 4
THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WAR
On September 30, 1914, barely a month after British troops were deployed to the Western Front, C. S. Lewis wrote his father from Great Bookham. Lewis had just arrived to study the classics with his father’s former tutor, William Thompson Kirkpatrick, and he was dumbstruck by the beauty of an English village seemingly unmolested by time. Yet the mood of “perfect restfulness” that Lewis first observed upon his arrival was slipping away.1
England had hoped to remain out of the war, but the Kaiser’s decision on August 4 to send German troops through Belgium compelled Britain to intervene. The British prime minister declared war on Germany the same day, and military recruitment campaigns were immediately launched around the country. Posters delivered the message: “Men of the Empire to Arms! God Save the King!” “If England Falls You Fall!” “The Empire Needs Men!” and “It is Nice in the Surf but What About the Men in the Trenches? Go and Help.” Thus Lewis wrote: “There is a good deal of war fever raging here, as is natural.”2
There would be a good deal more in the weeks and months ahead. British troops could not prevent a German takeover of the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the strategic port city of Antwerp. By October 6, round-the-clock German shelling sent sixty thousand Belgian troops fleeing the city. Soon thousands of refugees arrived in England, and in Great Bookham there were plans to take them in. Wrote Lewis to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”
Meanwhile, German submarines were operating in the Irish Sea, posing a threat to civilian travel. “There is the frightful prospect of living on opposite sides of the channel for two, five, or six years,” Lewis complained. “That of course is unthinkable.”3 Talk of German spies was rampant.
Soldiers on leave, many bearing the wounds of battle, were returning to England with grim stories of combat. A former student of Kirkpatrick’s, Oswald Smythe, arrived at Kirkpatrick’s house in March 1915 and made an impression on Lewis for his courage: “That Gerald Smythe of whom I told you, who lost an arm in the war, was staying with us last week. He is really wonderful: he has only been out of bed about a month and is going back to the front again next week. It does one good to see a person thoroughly cheerful under circumstances like this, and actually eager to be there again.”4
Lewis did not share Smythe’s eagerness for battle, however. Perhaps his reading of Homer’s The Iliad, which he had begun a few weeks after the war broke out, had something to do with it. Although there is a notion that some British officers went into battle with The Iliad in their backpacks and the rage of Achilles in their hearts, Lewis was not one of them.5 Whatever elements of battle glory there are in The Iliad are more than offset by its scenes of suffering. As Bernard Knox observes in his introduction to the work, the men in Homer’s war story die in agony: they drop to their knees screaming, clawing the ground, moaning and gasping for life. “And death is the end,” writes Knox. “Homer offers no comforting vision of life beyond the grave.”6
Conversations with his older brother, Warren (“Warnie”), already a second lieutenant with the British Expeditionary Force, would have been equally sobering. Serving on the Western Front since November 1914, Warnie had seen enough slaughter for a lifetime. “I shall never be able to forget—a boy lay asleep on a bank and the mess by his head was his brains.”7 Not long after a visit with his brother, on leave in July 1915, Lewis noted in a diary that he “had ghastly dreams about the front and getting wounded last night.”8
In any event, Lewis was focused on his academic career; he wanted to explore his love of the classics and English literature and to cultivate friendships with like-minded scholars. Having been born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was still exempt from service in the British military. Not yet eighteen years old, he could not enlist—nor did he wish to. “Apropos of conscription, I sincerely hope that one of two things may happen,” he wrote his father. “Either that the war may be over before I am eighteen, or that conscription may not come into force before I have volunteered. I shouldn’t fancy going out to meet the others—as a conscript.”9
A TASTE OF GOODNESS
In the meantime, Lewis devoted himself to the reading of good books, especially the Romantics, including the works of William Morris, E. R. Eddison, John Keats, and Percy Shelley. He found himself, by his own description, “waist deep in Romanticism.” With news of soldiers perishing each week by the thousands at Verdun, Lewis was also reaching for works that would nourish a growing taste for fantasy. In March 1916, while waiting for a train at Great Bookham Station, Lewis bought a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance, a book that would reach deeply and unexpectedly into his imagination. Writing to his friend Arthur Greeves, he described a “great literary experience” in discovering the work. “Whatever the book you are reading now, you simply must get this at once.”
What is the quality in MacDonald’s story that Lewis found so compelling? MacDonald, a one-time Scottish minister, was a nineteenth-century author of fantasy novels. Regarded as among his most important works, Phantastes explores what at first seems to be a man’s search for feminine beauty, but turns out to be a quest for something much more profound, something deeply spiritual. Lewis later described its effect on him this way:
The whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men.10
What does it mean to have one’s imagination “converted” or “baptized” by a work of fantasy? In Lewis’s case, it seems that Phantastes rescued his imaginative cast of mind from its dark tendencies—made darker, perhaps, by the onset of the war—and introduced him to a “bright shadow,” a voice or force that drew him out of himself. It set before him a vision of a world that must have seemed wholly unlike his own: pure and radiant, yet morally severe.
Perhaps this was MacDonald’s intent. In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald hinted at one of his objectives in using the genre of the fairy tale. “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”11 Something, it seems, was awakened within Lewis, something that other authors had failed to summon. After the war, in a diary entry in 1923, Lewis hinted at the enormous importance he attached to the book: “After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book.”12
Lewis’s brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a close and lifelong friendship, called his discovery of MacDonald “a turning point in his life.”13 Biographers Roger Green and Walter Hooper regard the work as “the highlight among Lewis’s literary discoveries” during this time.14 Nearly forty years later, Lewis was still recommending MacDonald’s work to friends and acquaintances.15 Biographer George Sayer draws special attention to the book and the enduring power of its symbolism. “The influence of Phantastes on Jack lasted many years, perhaps all his life,” he writes. “It had a transforming influence on his attitude toward the ordinary, common things around him, imbuing them with its own spiritual quality.”16
A GATHERING STORM
That may be so in the long run, but the transformation described showed little sign of spilling over into Le
wis’s exterior life. His letters during this period, when touching on matters of faith, were generally skeptical.
Lewis was also dismissive of the war, perhaps his way of putting its deadly prospect out of his mind. In a letter to Arthur Greeves in June 1915, he described “the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life.” She reminded Lewis of a beloved portion of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1. “If you will play that record over, trying to turn that music into a person, you will know just how she looked and talked. Just 18, and off to do some ridiculous war-work, nursing or something like that at Dover of all places—what a shame!”17
In a letter to his father, Lewis continued to speculate that peace would arrive before he was forced to make a decision about enlistment: “I think we may reasonably hope that the war will be over before it begins to concern me personally.”18 Such hopes, however, were already proving futile.
On June 15, German zeppelins attacked London, hitting the busy Waterloo Station. The action, aimed at terrorizing civilians, helped to harden public animosity against Germany. “The Zeppelins over Scarborough and London were harbingers of a new era in which death would rain down from the sky on defenseless town-dwellers,” writes historian Niall Ferguson.19 Lewis, staying at the Kirkpatrick home, could see electric flashes in the skies caused by the bomb explosions. If the wind was blowing just right, he could “hear the mutter and grumble of the far distant guns in France.”20
A year later the war was mired in stalemate. Conscription, which went into effect in January 1916, made Lewis’s decision for him. He could not remain behind while other men his age were sent to the front; he resigned himself to the prospect of enlisting.
“It makes me so sad to think I shall have only two more sets of holidays of the good old type,” he wrote, “for in November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’ of France, which I have no ambition to face.”21 Lewis wrote about a school friend, Donald Hardman, who was to be drafted into the military by Christmas. “He . . . wants to know what I am going to do. . . . Of course if it turned out to be convenient, I should like to have a friend with me in the army, but it is hardly worth while making any special provisions for so small a matter. We shall see how it all works out.”22
On June 30, 1916—on the eve of the Battle of the Somme—Lewis wrote to his father expressing relief at the news that his father’s nephew, Richard Lewis, had been “safely wounded” in France and thus taken out of harm’s way. “It is by far the best thing that can happen to a man in the trenches.”
He was right, of course. Historians estimate that perhaps a third of all Allied casualties on the Western Front occurred in the trenches, either from enemy fire or disease. With twelve thousand miles of trenches on the Allied side alone, stretching from Flanders to the Swiss Alps, it is not hard to understand the death toll. Lewis mused that the “really unlucky ones” may serve without injury for a year or more—“always it would seem in the long run to be killed after returning from a leave.” The touch of fatalism is understandable, given the notorious depredations of trench warfare.
Indeed, in the same letter Lewis sensed that the war was entering a new phase of suffering: “Things look pretty black at present, don’t they?”23 The next day, on July 1, things were to become exponentially darker, as British and French troops launched the Somme offensive, a frenzy of concentrated killing that had almost no historical precedent in the annals of warfare.
THE CASE AGAINST GOD
Two weeks later, on July 14, as Tolkien and his men were preparing for their campaign at Ovillers, Lewis wrote to his father about “big news from the front” involving the Ulster Volunteer Force. The Irish soldiers, by their dedication and heroism in battle, compelled the War Department to accept them as an integral part of the British Army. “I suppose the losses are felt very heavily in Belfast: here, nobody seems to have noticed anything.”24
The losses Lewis had in mind were those sustained by the 36th Ulster Division on the first day of the Somme offensive. The Ulstermen had captured the Schwaben Redoubt, a German stronghold with a fortified bunker more than twenty feet deep. But by nightfall the Germans had driven them back, and many were caught between the Germans and their own artillery. At least two thousand Ulstermen—more than a tenth of all the British fatalities on July 1—died in the firefight.25
Nevertheless, their courage earned them high honors. Four Victoria Crosses were awarded to men of the Ulster Division for their bravery on that opening day of the campaign. The first Victoria Cross of the Battle of the Somme was given to William McFadzean, from Belfast, who saved the lives of fellow soldiers by throwing his body onto two bombs tossed into a trench.
What effect was news of the war having on Lewis? It is hard to say. Many years later, speaking to another generation of young men caught up in a great war, Lewis insisted that war produced at least one benefit: it forced us to consider our own mortality. “If active service does not prepare a man for death,” he asked, “what conceivable concentration of circumstances would?”26 There is little sign in the summer of 1916, however, that he was intellectually preparing himself for anything other than an academic career.
A deepening atheism may have had something to do with it. Lewis was reared in the Anglican Church, but he came to associate Christianity with “ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” Church sermons seemed vapid and irrelevant.
Lewis’s doubts about God and Christianity were reinforced by his tutor, Kirkpatrick, under whom he studied before applying to Oxford. Kirkpatrick was, in Lewis’s words, “a hard, satirical atheist.” From Kirkpatrick Lewis learned that unexamined beliefs and assumptions must be taken to the woodshed. Hardly any subject was taboo, including the war, which had begun just weeks before Lewis came under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage. “The commonest metaphors would be questioned,” Lewis recalled, “till some bitter truth had been forced from its hiding place.”
Thus a typical early exchange:
L: “These fiendish German atrocities—”
K: “But are not fiends a figment of the imagination?”
L: “Very well, then; these brutish atrocities—”
K: “But none of the brutes does anything of the kind!”
L: “Well, what am I to call them?”
K: “Is it not plain that we must call them simply Human?”27
Kirkpatrick’s ruthless rationality—like “red beef and strong beer”—exerted an enduring influence on his student. Lewis embraced the necessity of logic and reason, even as he pursued literary Romanticism. He learned not to abandon his conclusions, especially about spiritual matters, just because they might be unpopular. Shortly after the war, upon hearing of Kirkpatrick’s death, Lewis recalled the enormous impact of his mentor on his life. “It is however no sentiment, but plainest fact to say that I at least owe him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another,” he wrote to his father. “It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him—and this I shall be the better for as long as I live.”28
Nevertheless, in a series of letters to Arthur Greeves, Lewis defended his atheism with arguments that were perfectly in sync with the intellectual fashions of his day. “You ask me my religious view: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion,” he wrote. “There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.”29
Emerging academic disciplines such as psychology and sociology explained the rise of Christianity and other belief systems as primitive man’s attempt to cope with a frightening and dangerous world. Thus, for Lewis, Christianity was “one mythology among many”—and as false as all the others. “All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki.” Great men came to be regarded by their followers as gods, Lewis explained, around whom a cult emerged. “Now all this you must have heard before,” he wrote. “It is
the recognized scientific account of the growth of religions.”30
He advised Greeves to direct his own intellectual questions into the study of philosophy: “Its probings would at least save you from the intellectual stagnation that usually awaits a man who has found complete satisfaction in some traditional religious system.”31 If Lewis considered himself an atheist, he was a soft atheist; he would not completely rule out the possibility of something existing outside the material world. He admitted that “the universe is an absolute mystery,” and that new discoveries about the world should be expected and welcomed. “In the meantime,” he wrote, “I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (and already decaying) superstition.”
When Lewis personally encountered the “unskilled butchery of the first German war,” the attempt to reconcile a loving God with the problem of suffering appeared futile.32 As we’ll explore later, Lewis would write a series of poems, called Spirits in Bondage, expressing his distress over the failure of religious belief. The burden of belief, especially in wartime, would become intolerable.
A TREATY WITH REALITY
A more immediate burden, however, was now upon him. Just as Tolkien’s military career was drawing to a close, Lewis enlisted in the British Expeditionary Force. In December 1916 he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and hoping to secure an officer’s commission, joined the Officers’ Training Corps.
When Lewis arrived at Oxford on April 16, 1917, he found the university cluttered with a “huge mass of military people.” Wounded soldiers, cared for by a staff of nurses, occupied an entire quad of the college.33 The cadets training for commissions were “a rather bad lot,” Lewis complained, and are “busily engaged in eating and drinking on their splendid pay, for tomorrow they die.”34 Most everyone else was off to war.
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 9