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

  Lewis endeavored to put the war out of his mind until the day he deployed for France. In a May 27 letter to Greeves, he bad-mouthed a “priggish, illiterate” freshman for talking incessantly of his brother and cousin who had been killed at the front. “Well of course I respect them for it, and I sympathize with him for losing them. At the same time, I don’t think they need be dragged into every single conversation, on every opportunity!”35

  Years later, recalling this period in his life, Lewis admitted that he “put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible.” He denied, though, that he was trying to evade reality. “I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality,” he wrote, “the fixing of a frontier.” It seems that Lewis made a pact with his country that left him at least partially in control: “You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind.”36 Based on his letters to friends and family, he appeared to keep up his end of the treaty.

  Almost immediately, Lewis began training for trench warfare. “We spend a good deal of time in ‘the trenches,’ ” he wrote to his father. He described the model trenches assembled on campus grounds, complete with dugouts, shell holes, and graves. “This last touch of realistic scenery,” he quipped, “seems rather superfluous.”37 He was then sent across Oxford to Keble College, where he spent his days “trench digging and route marching under a blazing sun.”38

  Nevertheless, little of the training Lewis received could prepare him for what he would encounter in combat: the mortars, machine guns, grenades, gas, or barbed wire. “All you do is lead your party onto parade, hand them over to their instructor, and then walk about doing nothing at all,” he wrote. “It is a little tiring to the legs and I think will finally result in atrophy of the brain.”39

  During his training Lewis became friends with two men who would have a profound effect on his life. One was Edward Francis “Paddy” Moore, an Irishman from Bristol—“quite a good fellow”—with whom he shared a room at university. The other was Laurence Bertrand Johnson, elected a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford, whom Lewis admired for his intellect and literary tastes. “I think the only real change that you will find in me is an increasing tendency towards philosophy,” he wrote Greeves, “which has grown in the course of many interesting talks with my good friend Johnson.”40

  THE ATHEIST IN A FOXHOLE

  After three years of living with the knowledge of war, Lewis was ordered to deploy for France. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, a combat regiment. On November 17, 1917, he sailed from Southampton to Le Havre in Normandy, expecting to undergo more training. Instead, twelve days later, he was sent to the front line. He arrived on his nineteenth birthday.

  Writing from a village close to the town of Arras, Lewis concealed from his father the potential danger. “I suppose we have no reason to grumble: this was bound to come sooner or later. There is no need to worry for a good time yet, and I’ll try and let you hear every day when there is.”41 Months later, Lewis would continue to shield his father from the truth of the trenches. “You will be anxious to hear my first impressions of trench life,” he wrote. “This is a very quiet part of the line and the dug outs are very much more comfortable than one imagines at home.”42

  In fact, Lewis’s company spent much of the bitter winter months in the trenches near Monchy-Le-Preux, a scene of intense fighting and destruction. The Germans were driven out of the village, but reestablished their trench line about five hundred yards east, roughly a stone’s throw from the British line.43 On the day Lewis arrived, November 29, there was “considerable enemy shelling.” On the following day, his first day in the line, the enemy “shelled the trenches heavily practically all day.” A captain in his regiment was wounded.44

  “Through the winter,” Lewis wrote, “weariness and water were our chief enemies.”45 Lewis learned to sleep while marching. He knew the feeling of ice-cold water filling up his boot when it struck hidden barbed wire. He encountered “the very old and the very recent dead” on the battlefield.46 His experiences at Monchy-Le-Preux prompted Lewis to write a handful of poems about the war. In “French Nocturne,” he echoed the sense of dehumanization expressed by many war veterans:

  Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread

  And all is still; now even this gross line

  Drinks in the frosty silences divine

  The pale, green moon is riding overhead. . . .

  What call have I to dream of anything?

  I am a wolf. Back to the world again,

  And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men

  Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.47

  Biographer Alister McGrath believes that the merciless slaughter of war sharpened Lewis’s doubts about God. “His wartime experiences reinforced his atheism,” McGrath writes. “His poetry of the period rails against the silent, uncaring heaven.”48 Although we cannot know for certain, it does seem that the shock of mortal combat stirred a fresh revulsion for the pious doctrines of his youth. In “De Profundis,” Lewis scorned the notion of a loving God who intervenes in human affairs:

  Come let us curse our Master ere we die,

  For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.

  The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.49

  Lewis escaped the “endless ruin” of war, temporarily at least, when he contracted trench fever and was removed from the front. In February 1918 he was sent to No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport, near the French coast. He immediately wrote his friend Arthur Greeves: “Here I am safely ensconced in a bed in hospital, miles away from the line, thank the gods, and therefore at last in a position to write you a more or less respectable letter.” It is hard to overstate the sense of relief that soldiers like Tolkien and Lewis experienced once they were taken out of harm’s way. Max Plowman, who survived the Battle of the Somme, wrote that to be safely out of the trenches “is like being born again.”50 Lewis called his hospital stay “an unmixed blessing.51

  The blessing would not endure. Instead, after recovering, Lewis was rushed back to the front. “We have just come back from a four days tour in the front line during which I had about as many hours sleep,” he wrote his father on March 5. “Then . . . we spent the whole night digging.”52 Two weeks later, on March 19, Lewis and his battalion arrived at Fampoux, near Arras, and began preparations for a major assault.

  THIS IS WHAT HOMER WROTE ABOUT

  March 1918, in fact, was a moment of supreme danger for the Allies. The Communist Revolution in November 1917 had thrown Russia, a member of the Allied forces, into chaos. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, signed on March 3, 1918, took Russia out of the war—a potential disaster for the Allied cause. With Russia neutralized, Germany no longer needed to fight a war on two fronts: she could drive the British from the Somme and the French from the Aisne and achieve total victory on the Western Front. The German railway system began moving divisions from the Eastern Front westward into France, along with hundreds of heavy guns and machine guns. The Central Powers were preparing to launch a massive spring offensive, their “last great onslaught.”

  The German attack commenced on March 21, with an artillery bombardment that lasted five hours. At least 6,000 German heavy guns, 3,000 mortars, 326 fighter aircraft, and hundreds of tons of mustard gas were hurled against the British lines. On the first day of the battle the Germans advanced more than four miles, taking 21,000 soldiers prisoner. Winston Churchill, visiting a front-line headquarters when the shelling began, barely escaped with his life.

  Great Britain was sending thirty thousand troops a day into France, but they were not enough; the Allied effort was collapsing. “We cannot keep our divisions supplied with drafts for more than a short time at the present rate of loss,” British prime minister Lloyd George warned his ambassador in Washington DC. “This situation is undoubtedly critical and if Amer
ica delays now she may be too late.”53

  Under President Wilson, the United States had declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, promising the Allies hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits. But it took nearly a year before US “doughboys” began arriving in France. Although the Americans still lacked sufficient numbers to form their own brigades, Wilson gave the green light for US troops to join their British and French counterparts on the Western Front. Beginning on March 23, 1918, roughly a million American troops would arrive over the next six months. My grandfather, Michele Loconte, in the 91st Division of the First American Army, was among their ranks.

  On March 24, the day after Wilson’s order, Germany crossed the River Somme, threatening to drive a wedge between the British and French armies. The German offensive would eventually be thwarted, but at a terrible cost.54

  Among the casualties in the opening days of the battle was Edward “Paddy” Moore, second lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and Lewis’s friend from his Oxford days. Moore was last seen on March 24, defending a position against a much larger German force. Lewis had forged a close bond with Moore, his sister, and their mother, Mrs. Janie King Moore. Lewis and Moore promised each other that if either one of them was killed, the other would care for his surviving parent—a promise that Lewis kept.

  Mrs. Moore wrote to Albert Lewis months later, after she finally learned of her son’s death: “They tell me he was taken a prisoner, overthrew his guards, got back to our lines to be sent over again . . . was shot through the head and killed instantaneously,” she wrote. “I had built up such hopes on my only son, and they are buried with so many others in that wretched Somme.”55

  Albert Lewis was especially anxious about his own son’s situation; he had hoped, in vain, to get Lewis reassigned to safer duty on the front. On April 8, Lewis dashed off a note to tell his father he was safe. “We have had a fairly rough time, though we were not really in the thick of it,” he wrote. “I have lost one or two of my best friends and in particular a fellow called Perrett who used to be at Malvern, and who got a bit in the eye.”56 Frank Winter Perrett was in the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry when he was wounded on March 29. He survived his injuries.

  On April 14, the Somerset Light Infantry began their own assault on the German-held village of Riez du Vinage, near Arras. Knowledge of a previous battle must have been on their minds. Almost exactly a year earlier, in April 1917, the Allies had staged a large offensive, the Battle of Arras, which drew troops from the four corners of the British Empire.57 It was to be “the knockout blow” on the Western Front. Instead, it was an ambiguous bloodbath. When the assault was finally called off, it had cost the British and French 450,000 casualties, dead and wounded.

  A year later, Britain’s military leadership was no less determined to fight the German foe to the death. It was widely believed that a German victory on the Western Front now would be the end of the Allied cause. Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces in Europe, had just issued the order: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each man must fight to the end.”58

  At 6:30 p.m., as British artillery laid down a barrage, the Somerset Light Infantry went into action. They met intense machine-gun fire. “Owing to the accuracy of this fire,” according to the battalion report, “the advance was temporarily held up.”59 In fact, a number of men were cut down, but the battalion continued to advance. Lewis would recall The Iliad when he sought to describe the experience of coming under fire: “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about.”60 By 7:15 p.m., the assault was successful. Lewis safely reached the village, now in British hands, and received about sixty German prisoners.

  A MAN OF CONSCIENCE

  Nevertheless there were casualties, including Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, struck by machine-gun fire and dead the next day. He was twenty years old. Johnson had joined the army at about the same time as Lewis. The two met during military training at Oxford and found they had much in common. Both planned to take up their scholarship, their love of the classics, after the war. Both enjoyed debating the big questions about God, philosophy, and morality. Thrust into combat together, they found time to talk during lulls in the fighting.

  “I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there,” Lewis wrote soon after learning of his death. “I had him so often in my thoughts. . . . I can hardly believe he is dead.”61 Reflecting years later, Lewis declared that Johnson “would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed.” He even viewed Johnson’s arrival in his battalion as a providential challenge to his atheism—“in my own battalion also I was assailed”—and a vital part of his eventual conversion to Christianity.62 “In him I found dialectical sharpness such as I had hitherto known only in Kirk [Kirkpatrick], but coupled with youth and whim and poetry. He was moving toward Theism and we had endless arguments on that and every other topic whenever we were out of the line.”63

  Yet there was much more to Johnson that so deeply impressed Lewis beyond his debating skills: a quality of character that he had rarely encountered among his academic peers. Johnson possessed an unimpeachable integrity—a coherent moral code—that caught Lewis completely off guard: “The important thing was that he was a man of conscience. I had hardly till now encountered principles in anyone so nearly my own age and my own sort. The alarming thing was that he took them for granted. It crossed my mind for the first time since my apostasy that the severer virtues might have some relevance to one’s own life.”64

  We cannot know exactly how Johnson’s commitment to these “severer virtues” influenced Lewis in his journey toward Christian faith. But we know that he found it compelling—“I accepted his principles at once”—and that he was somewhat embarrassed by his own “unexamined life.” Lewis would have to reckon with Johnson’s principles, with the severity of the moral universe envisioned in the Bible, before his conversion could occur.65

  Meanwhile, the assault at Riez du Vinage was still in play. The next morning, on April 15, the Germans counterattacked by bombing the village. The British returned fire. A shell—probably fired from behind the British line—went off close to Lewis, killing Sergeant Harry Ayres. His death was a great loss to Lewis: the sergeant had treated him with unusual respect and compassion and “became to me almost like a father.”66

  Shrapnel from the same mortar struck Lewis in the hand, leg, and chest. A stretcher crew picked him up and took him to No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital, near Étaples. His brother, also deployed in France, borrowed a motorbike and rushed over to see him.

  With no life-threatening injuries, Lewis was sent home to England to make a full recovery. “Thank God Jacks has come through it safely,” Warnie wrote in his journal, “and that nightmare is now lifted from my mind.”67 Lewis learned that the fragment in his chest was too close to his heart to be removed; it would have to stay. “They will leave it there,” he wrote, “and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.”68 Lewis would not rejoin his battalion before the war ended; his soldiering days were done.

  “My life is rapidly becoming divided into two periods,” he wrote, “one including all the time before we got into the battle of Arras, the other since.”69 From a hospital bed in Bristol, Lewis now struggled to come to terms with the face of war: the shattered limbs and shattered minds, the men who never returned, the randomness of death. In addition to Moore and Johnson, most of the remainder of his friends would die in battle in the last year of the war: Alexander Gordon Sutton, killed January 2; Thomas Kerrison Davy, who died of his wounds on March 29; and Martin Ashworth Somerville, killed in Palestine on September 21. “I could sit down and cry over the whole business: and yet of course we have both much to be thankful for,” he wrote his father. “If I had not been wounded when I was, I should have gone through a terrible time. Nearly
all my friends in the Battalion are gone.”70

  A GLIMPSE OF NARNIA

  What Lewis and Tolkien and the fighting men of their generation endured was something novel in the history of warfare: modern science and technology ruthlessly devoted to the annihilation of both man and nature. Only a handful of statesmen openly worried about the infatuation with material and scientific advancement. Winston Churchill was one of them. “Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes life majestic and tolerable,” he wrote. “There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life.”71

  Lewis and Tolkien would use their literary gifts to contribute mightily to this task: the “confident expression” of human dignity in cultural life. At the same time, the abuse of science—its capacity to dehumanize its masters as well as its victims—would also be a major theme of their works. Rather than liberating human beings from their ancient frailties, science enslaved them. The dystopian world in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, for example, is dominated by an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., a cover for supernatural and sinister purposes. “There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall,” Lewis wrote. “If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate.”72

  Like Tolkien, the experience of war cut in two directions for Lewis. He could never quite forget its depredations: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [high explosive], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet . . .”73 And yet, as we’ll see, the sorrows of war did not ultimately blacken Lewis’s creative life. The world of Narnia, a land watered by streams of joy—“the land I have been looking for all my life”—would emerge from the wreckage of a Great War.