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

  Perhaps something like Narnia became visible during a journey to a hospital in London, where Lewis was sent to recover from his wounds. It seems likely that the simple pleasure of a train ride through the English countryside, set against the dreariness and horror of war, created for Lewis a powerful experience of joy: a sensation so compelling that it undermined his materialist outlook. As he wrote from his bed at Endsleigh Palace Hospital:

  Can you imagine how I enjoyed my journey to London? First of all the sight and smell of the sea, that I have missed for so many long and weary months, and then the beautiful green country seen from the train. . . . I think I never enjoyed anything so much as that scenery—all the white in the hedges, and the fields so full of buttercups that in the distance they seemed to be of solid gold.74

  The experience appears to have wrought a change in Lewis—a small change, perhaps, but a permanent one. It quickened his belief in a spiritual, otherworldly source of natural beauty. “You see the conviction is gaining ground on me that after all Spirit does exist,” he wrote. “I fancy that there is Something right outside time & place, which did not create matter, as the Christians say, but is matter’s great enemy: and that Beauty is the call of the spirit in that something to the spirit in us. You see how frankly I admit that my views have changed.”75

  Something “outside time and place” had stirred him. Perhaps the stirring began with George MacDonald and Phantastes, the book Lewis discovered during the war. This story of the human longing for beauty in the midst of sorrow and death would, in some respects, anticipate Lewis’s own quest. “She smiled when she saw that my eyes were open,” wrote MacDonald. “I asked her whether it was day yet. She answered, ‘It is always day here, so long as I keep my fire burning.’ I felt wonderfully refreshed; and a great desire to see more of the island awoke within me.”76

  CHAPTER 5

  THE LAND OF SHADOW

  Three weeks after the German surrender at Compiegne on November 11, 1918, ending the First World War, the American president left for Europe to help broker the peace. In January, Woodrow Wilson had outlined his dream for a new global order, in his Fourteen Points, a document imbued with progressive assumptions about democracy, humanity, and international politics. Wilson’s League of Nations would prevent another war, either through moral suasion or collective security. “They are the principles of mankind,” he told the US Congress, “and they must prevail.”

  They would not prevail, of course, but many in Europe were not yet prepared to believe it. They wanted to believe that, under Wilson’s enlightened leadership, democratic principles would govern the nations of the earth. All over Europe there were parks, squares, streets, and railway stations bearing Wilson’s name. Posters declared, “We Want a Wilson Peace.” Italians knelt in front of his image. In France, the left-wing newspaper L’Humanite devoted an issue to praising the American president. Nationalist movements from Korea to Arabia clung to the Fourteen Points as their lodestar.1

  Thus, when Wilson arrived in Paris on December 13, throngs of admirers were there to greet him. They filled the streets, hung from windows, cheered from rooftops. “He was transfigured in the eyes of men,” wrote H. G. Wells. “He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.” In a war that had devastated so many lives and nations, Europeans longed for a redemptive outcome. Wilson, as the leader of the only democracy that seemed capable of negotiating a just peace, held out the prospect of redemption. “Wilson kept alive the hope that human society, despite the evidence, was getting better, that nations would one day live in harmony,” writes historian Margaret MacMillan. “In 1919, before disillusionment had set in, the world was more than ready to listen to him.”2

  Listening is one thing, however. Wilson believed that, armed only with rhetoric and idealism, he could remake international politics conform to his progressive, humanitarian vision. It was an impossible hope. The old rivalries and prejudices and power politics would reappear. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, proved a profound disappointment to just about everyone involved. The Germans felt betrayed by their leaders, while the victors lacked the will to enforce the treaty’s provisions. “Is this the end?” asked Winston Churchill in The World Crisis. “Is it merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story?”3

  THE END OF ILLUSIONS

  In the years after the conflict, the cruelty and senselessness of the war—of any war for any reason—became the dominant motifs of a generation. The writings of authors such as Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), T. S. Eliot (The Hollow Men), and Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) reinforced these themes in the public mind. The watchword was disillusionment: a new cynicism about liberal democracy, capitalism, Christianity, and the achievements of Western civilization.

  Barbara Tuchman, in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Guns of August, captured the postwar intellectual mood of millions:

  Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope—the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid. . . . Nothing less could give dignity or sense to the monstrous offensives in which thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed to gain ten yards and exchange one wet-bottomed trench for another. When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results, and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.4

  Given the scale of human slaughter, how could it be otherwise?5 The destructiveness of the First World War exceeded that of all other wars known in human history: more than sixteen million dead, twenty-one million wounded, hundreds of thousands buried in unmarked graves.

  Most of the nations of Europe suffered grievous losses. Russia gave up 1.7 million men, another 5 million wounded. In Germany, roughly 465,000 soldiers were killed each year for the duration of the war. The generation of German men from nineteen to twenty-two years of age was reduced by 35 percent. In France, the casualty rate (dead or wounded) was an astonishing 75 percent. About 2 million French soldiers died, or roughly 25 percent of all the men in France, leaving behind 630,000 war widows. In Britain, 921,000 soldiers were dead, more than 2 million wounded; one of every three British households had a man killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The United States, which suffered the fewest casualties among the great powers, lost more than 116,000 men, and twice that number wounded.

  Many civilians suffered and died during the war. The Allied blockade of Germany caused roughly 750,000 deaths from starvation and disease. In Serbia, with a prewar population of 5 million, about 125,000 were killed in action. But another 650,000 civilians died from disease or hunger—a total of 15 percent of the population lost. Massacres of civilians were carried out on a shocking scale, most notoriously by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenian minority: men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands were executed, their bodies dumped in mass graves. “Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink, or shelter,” writes historian David Fromkin. “Turkish Armenia was destroyed, and about half its people perished.”6 It was the first true genocide of the twentieth century.7

  Europeans immediately embarked on a collective program of remembrance. Cemeteries and memorials devoted to the fallen began appearing all over the Continent. At large sites honoring the soldiers who fought at Verdun, Ypres, the Somme, and Meuse Argonne, the crosses and headstones seem to stretch into eternity. In Belgium, at Tyne Cot, the largest British war cemetery in the world, there are nearly twelve thousand graves. Between 1920 and 1923, Britain delivered four thousand headstones a week to France.8 Indeed, Britain’s sacrifice is recalled in virtually
every cathedral in France, where a cross and tablet bear this inscription: “To the Glory of God and in memory of one million men of the British Empire who died in the Great War and of whom the greatest number rest in France.” Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, hardly a year passed without a ceremony unveiling another imposing monument.9

  Beginning in 1919, by the king’s proclamation, Great Britain observed two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, a tradition that continues to this day. In towns where Christian holidays such as Good Friday might be lightly observed, “it is Armistice Day that draws everyone to church.”10

  THE VERTIGO YEARS

  The unprecedented butchery of the war produced not only a deep sense of grief and disillusionment. It created a feeling of helplessness, a psychological gloom among the survivors. It is an outlook expressed poignantly in the final pages of Remarque’s memoir. All Quiet on the Western Front describes a generation of soldiers who will return to civilian life “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.”11 The mood was acute among writers, artists, and public intellectuals, but affected ordinary middle-class Europeans as well. “Dismay was a mainstream concern,” writes Richard Overy in The Twilight Years. “For the generation living after the end of the First World War the prospect of imminent crisis, a new Dark Age, became a habitual way of looking at the world.”12

  Book titles tell much of the story: McCabe’s The End of the World (1920); Freeman’s Social Decay and Degeneration (1921); Webb’s The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (1923); Muret’s The Twilight of the White Races (1926); Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926–28); Kenworthy’s Will Civilization Crash? (1927); Bond’s Racial Decay (1928); Gibbs’s The Day After Tomorrow: What Is Going to Happen to the World? (1928); Riddell’s Sterilization of the Unfit (1929); Burns’s Modern Civilization on Trial (1931); Milner’s The Problem of Decadence (1931); Auden’s The Dance of Death (1933); and Dearmer’s Christianity and the Crisis (1933).

  The fear that civilization was under threat was more than a literary trope. The concepts of decline and collapse, of sickness and death, infected nearly every cultural endeavor: intellectual, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, and religious.13 For these thinkers, the notion of humanity’s moral and spiritual progress lay in the dustbin of history. “We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization,” wrote Spengler, “instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture.”14

  Although his Catholic faith remained intact, J. R. R. Tolkien later confessed that he “bemoaned the collapse of all my world” that began with his deployment to the Western Front.15 Here he seemed to have in mind the frustration of his creative and intellectual longings; the war forced him to mostly put aside his imaginative powers just to survive. “It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much,” he wrote later. “I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again.”16

  Tolkien was demobilized from the British Expeditionary Force on July 16, 1919, and moved back to Oxford with his wife, Edith, and infant son, John. He joined the staff of the New English Dictionary, a cohort of experts at work on an exhaustive dictionary of the English language. Thrust into the role of the philologist, Tolkien excelled. His intellectual energies—his passion for the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages—had found a worthy outlet. As the dictionary’s editor, Henry Bradley, described him at the time: “I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal.”17

  After serving as a professor of English Language at Leeds University, Tolkien won a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. Nevertheless, his early academic success could not erase the heartache of war. Oxford University lost nearly one in five servicemen in the conflict. From Exeter College, Tolkien’s college, 141 men had perished. Thus he experienced “a time of sorrow and mental suffering.”18 The loss of so many friends to the war produced, in the words of his children, “a lifelong sadness.”19

  When C. S. Lewis was demobilized from the army on Christmas Eve, 1918, he could hardly believe that the many months of anxiety—of having to return to the battle—had come to an end. “It is almost incredible that the war is over, isn’t it,” he wrote Arthur Greeves, “not to have the ‘going back’ hanging over my head all the time. This time last year I was in the trenches.”20 Lewis immediately left for Belfast to see his father and brother. “It was as if the evil dream of four years had passed away and we were still in the year 1915,” Warnie wrote in his diary. “In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honor of the event.”21

  In January 1919, Lewis returned to Oxford, as did more than eighteen hundred ex-servicemen, to resume his studies in the classics at University College. The place was already abuzz with lectures and debates, making Lewis aware of “a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before.” When the minutes from a 1914 meeting of one of Lewis’s college clubs were read aloud, though, he was taken aback. “I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.”22

  He mourned the passing of old friends. Upon hearing the news of the death of his mentor, William Kirkpatrick, Lewis confessed an internal struggle. “He is so indelibly stamped on one’s mind once known, so often present in thought, that he makes his own acceptance of annihilation the more unthinkable,” he wrote his father in 1921. “I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing.”23

  Though sensitive to religious questions, Lewis remained uncommitted. Still a young man, he already had experienced deep sorrow and struggle, and it left him with a sober, if not gloomy, view of the world. “The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war . . . had given me a pessimistic view of existence,” he wrote years later. “My atheism was based on it.”24 He turned his heart and mind to literature; academic study absorbed him. “He has read more classics than any boy I ever had,” Kirkpatrick once said of him. “He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study.”25 As Lewis expressed his outlook at the time, apart from the people who were important to him, “work is the only thing . . . that is worth caring about.”26

  In the winter of 1922, Lewis recorded in his diary a conversation with Dr. John Askins, the brother of Mrs. Moore, known as “the Doc.” Askins had served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was wounded in January 1917. He had come to stay with his sister for a few weeks, and one evening after dinner Lewis and Askins went for a walk. “We went beyond his lodgings to the end of Iffley village to look at the church and the trees in the starlight,” he wrote. “I don’t know how, but we fell to talking of death—on the material side—and all the other horrors hanging over one. The Doc said that if you stopped to think, you couldn’t endure this world for an hour. I left him and walked home.”27

  Many postwar thinkers and writers, in fact, were unwilling to endure the world in its new form: a kind of spiritual vertigo took hold, a frantic search for solutions to the human predicament. Freudian psychology, eugenics, socialism, spiritualism, scientism—these and other ideologies were attempts to solve, or explain away, the horrors that seemed to be hanging over the human race. Though these ideas may have originated before the war, by the 1920s they were gaining ground rapidly in Europe and the United States.

  UNLEASHING NEW PLAGUES

  Indeed, it can be argued that the Great War launched three of the deadliest forces in the history of the West.

  The first was Spanish influenza, which originated at a US Army base in Kansas in March 1918. The virus crossed Europe on crowded American troopships and spread throughout the Continent. Before it ran its course, upward of sixty million people—four times the number killed in the war—died from influenza worldwide.
“The morticians worked day and night,” recalled Josie Mabel Brown, a US Naval Nurse. “You could never turn around without seeing a big red truck being loaded with caskets for the train station so the bodies could be sent home.”28 In the midst of the outbreak, George Newman, Chief Medical Officer of Britain’s Ministry of Health, proclaimed that influenza had “destroyed more human lives in a few months than did the European war in five years.”29

  Like the conflict that helped to launch the epidemic, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults: men and women from fifteen to forty years of age, in the prime of their lives.30 Victims displayed “the dreaded blueness” of the face, the sign of pneumonia, of the patient drowning in the fluids building up in the lungs. “This was an illness without precedent,” writes historian Susan Kingsley Kent, “whose etiology and treatment could not be discerned or determined.”31 My grandmother, Esther Aiello, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, at the time, would recall those days with a sense of dread. “We used to watch them carry the bodies out of the houses,” she said. “Everyone was afraid.”32

  The second epidemic was atheistic communism. When Russia pulled out of the war in early 1917, the days of the Tsarist regime were numbered. After the Romanov dynasty—which had ruled Russia for three centuries—finally collapsed, the emergence of a “Provisional Government” stirred hopes of a democratic revolution. “Good Lord, it’s so great that Tsar Nicholas and the autocracy no longer exist!” wrote a Russian soldier in his diary. “This is the dawn of a great new Russia, happy and joyful. We soldiers are free men, we are equal, we are all citizens of Great Russia now!”33