No wonder one newspaper called the Armistice “the greatest day in the history of the world.”25 There was rejoicing on that day, amid the oceans of sorrow.
Yet no full and final consolation could be found in the peace that followed. No war could end war for all time, or transform the nations into a brotherhood of man. “It was a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his diary.26 T. S. Eliot saw the postwar world as a wasteland of human weariness. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” he wrote, “where the dead men lost their bones.”27 Erich Remarque predicted a generation of men “broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.” Civilian life, he said, would bring no comfort to the survivors: “We will not be able to find our way any more.”28
BEHOLD THE KING
After returning to England from the front, Tolkien and Lewis might easily have joined the ranks of the rootless and disbelieving. Instead, they became convinced there was only one truth, one singular event, that could help the weary and brokenhearted find their way home: the Return of the King.
This King is stronger than “that Hideous Strength” that roams Narnia and Middle-earth looking for victims to devour. He is the archetype of the heroic, in every culture and in every age. He is the source of all goodness and courage, the desire of the nations. He comes to restore “the long-lost days of freedom.”29 This King alone knows the way to that Blessed Realm that lies beyond the Sea. “The light ahead was growing stronger,” wrote Lewis in The Last Battle. “Lucy saw that a great series of many-colored cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty.”30
This King comes with power and beauty, as the voice of conscience and the source of consolation, as the Lion and the Lamb. Here, perhaps, is the lingering influence of George MacDonald. “Loving-kindness beamed from every line of his face,” he wrote of the noble knight in Phantastes. Even so, the knight’s face grew “stern and determined, all but fierce,” as his eyes “burned on like a holy sacrifice, uplift on a granite rock.”31 What Lewis discovered and came to embrace in MacDonald’s vision was the “union of tenderness and severity.”32
No character in all of Lewis’s fiction embodies this blending of virtues more convincingly than Aslan. In The Silver Chair, Jill finds herself torn between fear and desire when the Lion appears and blocks her path to a stream of life-giving water:
“Are you thirsty?” said the Lion.
“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion. . . .
“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?”
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
“Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. . . .
“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.33
In his youthful atheism, Lewis didn’t recognize these qualities as belonging to the central figure of Christianity: Jesus the Christ. But his own careful reading of the gospels helped change his mind. “Nowhere else outside the New Testament,” he wrote, “have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.”34
Tolkien achieves much the same effect with Aragorn, the chief epic hero of The Lord of the Rings. He is a man of great courage, determination, and humility. Aragorn carries several names, all rich in meaning. He first appears as Strider, a dark and mysterious traveler. As a child he was called Estel, a name meaning “hope,” and a frequent theme throughout. In the House of Healing he names himself Envinyatur, or “Renewer.” He is later called Lord of the Western Lands and King of the West. His true stature is revealed only after Sauron is defeated and he finally assumes his throne:
But when Aragorn arose all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time. Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood; and wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him. And then Faramir cried: “Behold the King!”35
In the end, the creators of Narnia and Middle-earth offer a vision of human life that is at once terrifying and sublime. They insist that every soul is caught up in an epic story of sacrifice and courage and clashing armies: the Return of the King. It is the day when every heart will be laid bare. We will know, with inexpressible joy or unspeakable sorrow, whether we have chosen Light or Darkness. “For the day of the LORD is near,” wrote the prophet, “in the valley of decision.”36 Hence comes a warning, as well as a blessing: to deny the King, to turn away in grief or rage, means endless ruin. But to behold him—to be counted among his Beloved—is to pass into life everlasting.
“Is everything sad going to come untrue?” asks Sam.37 Here we find, beyond all imagination, the deepest source of hope for the human story. For when the King is revealed, “there will be no more night.”38 The Shadow will finally and forever be lifted from the earth. The Great War will be won.
This King, who brings strength and healing in his hands, will make everything sad come untrue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book—at least no book by this author—can be written without the help of many hands and minds and voices. I want to thank my extended Italian-American family, whose love and support help sustain me. Special thanks to my brother, Mike, for his research into our family history and our mutual interest in the First World War, and to his wife, Ann Marie; to my sister Sue and her husband Joe, who lighten my burdens in so many ways; and to my nephews and niece, who remind me of what’s really important. Many thanks to my cohort of friends and advisers, including: Kara Callaghan, Cherie Harder, John and Kelli Baker, Ken and Marilyn Jackson, Mark and Patti Kreslins, Lia and Charles Howard, Nile Gardiner, Eric Metaxas, Alan Crippen, Mark Tooley, Jedd Medefind, Tim Schwartz, Charlie Catlett, Tim Montgomerie, Ben Rogers, Daniel Johnson, Os Guinness, and Michael Cromartie.
My research assistant, Carol Anne Kemp, a former student of mine at the King’s College, deserves special recognition. Carol Anne’s love and knowledge of the works of Tolkien and Lewis proved to be utterly indispensable. Her literary instincts—shared during our many conversations over coffee—improved the manuscript immeasurably.
Every historian owes a debt to those who have come before him. Many thanks to the Tolkien and Lewis scholars who have done so much to illuminate the lives of these great men, and to the Tolkien and Lewis estates for preserving their works. I am equally grateful to the many WWI historians who have devoted much of their professional lives to helping us understand the nature of that conflict.
I want to thank my friends at Thomas Nelson, Nelson Books: Joel Miller, for his robust support for the book before he moved on to other endeavors; Webster Younce, executive editor, for his strong encouragement; Janene MacIvor, senior editor, whose skill and patience and encouragement are without equal in the editing world; and copy editor Zachary Gresham, for his professionalism and dogged efforts. My literary agents, Joel Kneedler and Bryan Norman, also deserve much thanks.
I am also deeply grateful to Greg Thornbury, president of the King’s College, for creating the space in my academic calendar to tackle the book, and for his great friendship, a tonic for the heart. I also want to thank all my colleagues and students at the King’s College for their steady encouragement. Finally, many thanks to my friends at the District Church in Washington DC, especially members of the Lewis and Linguine group, for their fellowship in the faith.
A REMEMBRANCE
One of the great satisfactions of working on this book was learning more about how the First
World War affected the lives of ordinary soldiers and their families—including my own family history.
My paternal grandfather, Michele (Michael) Loconte, was a twenty-year-old Italian émigré living and working in the United States when war broke out in August 1914. He was drafted into the US military in 1917 as America prepared to enter the war. After training with the 91st Division—known as the “Wild West Division”—he was deployed with the US Expeditionary Force to the Western Front in the summer of 1918. My grandfather served as a private with the 91st Division, C Company, the 316th Ammunition Train for the remainder of the war.
Beginning on September 20, 1918, Loconte’s division participated in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the final and decisive campaign of the war—and the deadliest for the United States. More than 26,000 US soldiers were killed in the battle, including 1,702 from the 91st Division. The divisional record describes their advance during the last week of September:
During our march forward we had passed column after column of troops of other divisions and interminable truck trains had rumbled all night through every billeting town that we occupied. And now, hidden in the Foret de Hesse, we began to be surrounded by an ever-thickening concentration of artillery, long-range rifles, stumpy howitzers, battery after battery of smaller guns. They came in night after night, and by daybreak each new increment had melted out of sight in the woods and high roadside hedges, or had disappeared under camouflage in the open. It seemed as if all the guns in France were gathered together in the crowded forest.1
Their orders were unambiguous: they were to devote themselves unreservedly to the task of defeating the Germany army. “Divisions will advance independently of each other,” the divisional record states, “pushing the attack with utmost vigor and regardless of cost.”2
Although my grandfather rarely spoke about his wartime experience, he must have seen his share of human suffering. Nevertheless, his division performed admirably: the 91st captured more artillery, machine guns, and prisoners, and advanced farther under fire than other divisions with more combat experience. Their successes at the Argonne Forest formed a vital part of the “Grand Offensive” by the Allies along the Western Front, regarded as the battle that crushed German hopes for victory and produced the Armistice on November 11, 1918.
For service in the American Expeditionary Force, and love for his adopted country, my grandfather was made a proud citizen of the United States, naturalized on September 15, 1919. He eventually moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he raised his family and helped to launch Conte Farms, an egg-and-dairy delivery business.
Michael and Theodora Loconte are buried in Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.
NOTES
Introduction
1. G. J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Random House, 2006), 220.
2. Ibid.
3. “Carols, Plum Pudding, Beer and Bullets,” in The First World War: An Illustrated History, Special 100th Anniversary Commemoration, 27.
4. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 110–111.
5. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 8.
6. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 642.
7. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 2005), 291.
8. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (London: Penguin, 2009), 363.
9. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2002), xvii.
10. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 237.
11. Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J. R. R. Tolkien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 3.
12. Churchill, The World Crisis, 293.
13. Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 548.
14. J. R. R. Tolkien, foreword to The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), xxiv.
15. Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 2 (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 258.
16. K. J. Gilchrist, A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 218.
17. The phrase appears in Tolkien’s essay “On Translating Beowulf” in Christopher Tolkien, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (HarperCollins, 2006), 60.
18. Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York: Time-Life Books, 1961), 16.
19. Lee D. Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 4.
20. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” in Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 54.
21. Carol Zaleski, “C. S. Lewis’s Aeneid,” The Christian Century, June 2, 2011. Walter Hooper has written that “Lewis probably read the Aeneid more often than he did any other book.” Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 39.
22. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 147.
23. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 51–52.
24. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 89.
25. Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 4.
26. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 766.
27. Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy, 85, 134.
28. Walter Hooper, ed., Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Jovanovich, 1986), 42.
29. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 75.
30. Tolkien once admitted that “as far as any character is ‘like me’ it is Faramir—except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.” Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 232.
31. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 672.
Chapter 1: The Funeral of a Great Myth
1. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 3.
2. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Washington DC: Regnery, 1999), 7–8.
3. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 3.
4. Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History, 3.
5. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (Memphis: Bottom of the Hill, 2012), 103.
6. Ibid., 119–120.
7. H. G. Wells, The New World Order (London: Secker and Warburg, 1940), 10.
8. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), 66.
9. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Perseus, 2002), 240.
10. Ibid., xxiv.
11. “Crystal Palace to Rise from the Ashes as Chinese Cash Rebuilds Symbol of Empire,” The Times of London, Oct. 4, 2013.
12. Roger Osborne, Civilization: A New History of the Western World (New York: Pegasus Books, 2006), 400, 420.
13. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1988), 63.
14. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 179.
15. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 250.
16. Ibid., 288.
17. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), xiii. Also in Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 146.
18. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 87–88.
19. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 473.
20. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 198
4), 11.
21. Roger Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 20.
22. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1480.
23. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 450.
24. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 499–500.
25. Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2013), 276.
26. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 353.
27. Ibid., 406.
28. Martin Gilbert, The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 66.
29. Gilbert, The First World War, 533.
30. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 2.
31. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 319.
32. Osborne, Civilization, 400–401.
33. Herbert Spencer, The Evanescence of Evil Part I, Chapter 2, concluding paragraph.
34. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 33.
35. Ibid., 35.
36. Ibid., 32.
37. Lesley Walmsley, ed., C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 29.
38. Ibid., 26, 28.
39. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 201.
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 19