Tolkien and the Great War (17 page)

On the Somme, the squirming misery of the winter mud had given way to an incongruous renascence of anemones, poppies, bluebells, and cowslips. In some snatched moment of tranquillity, G. B. Smith had written:

Now spring has come
upon the hills in France,

And all the trees are delicately fair,

As heeding not the great guns' voice, by chance

Brought down the valley on a wandering air…

Smith had sent home for a copy of the
Odyssey
, and the compartmentalized life continued in his letters to Tolkien, which dwelt almost exclusively on the poetry for which he fought, not on trench life itself – though he had mentioned a narrow escape on April Fool's Day when an aeroplane deposited two bombs nearby. Censorship was not the reason: usually only details of troop movements were suppressed. Smith simply preferred (like many soldiers) to keep the horror and exhaustion out of his letters. But he longed for the company of his old friends: ‘I wish another council were possible…All the TCBS is ever in my thoughts, it is for them I carry on, and in the hope of a reunion refuse to be broken in spirit,' he had written some time ago. A council of the four remained impossible, but now the opportunity came for a reunion with Tolkien.

The week after Tolkien's signals course ended, a telegram announced that Smith was back at home. The two quickly arranged to meet and, on the last Saturday of May 1916, a train carrying Smith pulled into Stafford station. Eight months had passed since the friends last met at Lichfield. Smith stayed overnight at Great Haywood, and for most of the Sunday too, eking out the splendid reunion as long as he could. ‘Nothing could have been more reassuring or more encouraging and inspiring than to see once again a TCBSite in the flesh and realise that
he had changed not at all,' Smith wrote on returning to his battalion in France. ‘Me I have no doubt you found different: more tired and less vigorous: but neither, I firmly believe, have I changed in any one vital particular. The TCBS has not shirked its plain duty: it will never shirk it: I am beyond words thankful for that.'

The plain duty of the TCBS entailed the relinquishment of pleasure, and perhaps life itself, as Smith wrote in his spring poem:

There be still some
, whose glad heart suffereth

All hate can bring from her misbegotten stores,

Telling themselves, so England's self draw breath,

That's all the happiness on this side death.

This was a fellowship founded on laughter, schoolboy pranks, and youthful enthusiasms. At times, happiness seemed to live in the past, in the tea room at Barrow's Stores, in the library cubby-hole at King Edward's, or even in the Governor's Room, sitting exams as the master paced silently up and down behind their backs and the smell of tar drifted in from New Street.
‘The real days'
, a dejected Wiseman called them, ‘when one felt oneself to be somebody, and had something to substantiate the feeling, when it was possible to get something done, such as win a match or act a play or pass an exam, the most important things that ever can be done…' Doubtless Tolkien, busily creative and newly married, felt rather differently about the value of his life since leaving school. Nevertheless, he saw the TCBS as an ‘oasis' in an inhospitable world.

Yet the Tea Club was now much more than a refuge. As well as hilarity and good conversation, TCBSianism had come to mean fortitude and courage and alliance. Smith, displaying his weakness for bombast, had once likened the four to the Russian army battling vastly superior German and Austro-Hungarian forces (‘
the most magnificent
spectacle Europe has seen for generations', as he called it). But the TCBS had absorbed patriotic duty into its constitution not simply because its members were
all patriots. The war mattered because it was being fought ‘so England's self draw breath': so that the inspirations of ‘the real days' of peace might survive.

One facet of their duty was not so plain. Somewhere along the line the TCBS had decided it could change the world. The view had been born on the rugby pitch in the spirited exploits of Wiseman and Tolkien, the Great Twin Brethren. It had grown during the battle to wrest control of school life from boorishness and cynicism – a prolonged struggle from which the TCBS had emerged victorious. The ejection of ‘Tea-Cake' Barnsley and the vapid, irony-obsessed members of the TCBS had left the Council of London free to reaffirm the society's sense of mission. Tolkien had told them that they had a ‘
world-shaking power
', and (with the occasional exception of the more cautious Gilson) they all believed it.

Now they felt that, for them, the war was only the preparation for the task that lay in store. It was a ‘
travail underground
' from which they would emerge enriched, Gilson said. ‘I have faith,' he ventured, ‘that the TCBS may for itself – never for the world – thank God for this war some day.' Smith observed that ‘Providence insists on making each TCBSian fight his first battles alone', and Wiseman underlined the fortifying virtue of the divine scheme. ‘
Really you three
, especially Rob, are heroes,' he wrote. ‘Fortunately we are not entirely masters of our fate, so that what we do now will make us the better for uniting in the great work that is to come, whatever it may be.'

All this might sound like so much hot air, were it not for two considerations. These young men were gifted members of a gifted generation; and they included in their ‘
republic
' of equals a genius whose work has since reached an audience of millions. When orders arrived on Friday 2 June instructing him to travel to Folkestone for embarkation overseas, Tolkien already believed that the terrors to come might serve him in the visionary work of his life – if he survived.

There was no fanfare when he left Cannock Chase. In contrast to his friends, who had marched out of their training camps with their entire divisions of more than 10,000 men, Tolkien went alone: his training battalion stayed at home and sent men out as and when the fighting battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers needed reinforcements.

Tolkien was given forty-eight hours for his ‘last leave'. He and Edith went back to Birmingham, where on Saturday they spent a final night together at the
Plough and Harrow
Hotel in Edgbaston, just down the road from the Oratory and Father Francis. The house in Duchess Road where he and Edith had met as lodgers was minutes away. Visible across the street was the Highfield Road house where he had lived with Hilary after contact with Edith was banned.

Late on Sunday 4 June, 1916, Tolkien set off for the war. He did not expect to survive. ‘Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,' he later recalled. ‘Parting from my wife then…it was like a death.'

It was the darkest hour of the war so far for Tolkien. So it was for the Allies too. France had been bleeding at Verdun for fifteen pitiless weeks. Ireland, meanwhile, was simmering after the failed Easter Rising against British rule. But on Saturday 3 June 1916, newspapers proclaimed the biggest blow so far to British self-confidence. The Grand Fleet had finally met the German navy in battle and, it seemed at first, had got the worst of it.

Guiltily, Christopher Wiseman had come to enjoy life aboard his vast ‘Dreadnought' warship, much of it spent at anchor in
Scapa Flow
. The Navy breed were contemptuous of landlubbers like himself; he was teetotal, whereas many of the officers seemed to live for drink; and they spoke without moving their lips. But there were occasional trips to the town of Kirkwall on Orkney or, weather permitting, rounds of golf on the tiny island of Flotta. Once, indulging his passion for archaeology, Wiseman led an expedition to explore the prehistoric barrow of Maes Howe. Teaching was also becoming something of a hobby, even though the trainee midshipmen in his care, colourfully known as ‘snotties', proved intractable. He taught them mathematics, mechanics, and navigation, but like a true TCBSian he also tried to plug the gap in their literary education. ‘The Snotty,' he told Tolkien, ‘is the stupidest boy in existence, and withal the most conceited. However, I like them all very much…' Occasionally the
Superb
would sweep the North Sea up to Norway, but the Germans were never to be seen: the naval blockade was working, and the sole danger seemed to be boredom.

But on 31 May 1916, the 101st day of the Battle of Verdun, Germany's High Seas Fleet ventured out of port and Britain's Grand Fleet took the bait, racing out from Scapa Flow to meet them off the coast of Denmark. Wiseman was set to oversee the
Superb's
range-finding table. Early in the evening the
Superb
fired off several salvoes at a light cruiser over 10,000 yards away and flames were seen to burst out amidships. Surely this was a palpable hit, and the German vessel had been sunk. But no, it was afterwards seen, still in one piece, by ships astern. Again an hour later the
Superb
opened fire and struck home on the third and fourth salvoes; the enemy ship turned away, burning. The gunnery commander, who could see the battle with his own eyes, doubted many of Wiseman's calculations; but the mist and the smoke of confrontation meant the fleets were fighting half-blind, and mathematics came into its own.

If the
Superb
had been hit, the decks, which had no airtight compartments, would have swiftly flooded from prow to stern, as Wiseman was only too conscious:
‘No one below decks would get away in the case of a torpedo,'
he said. So it was fortunate for him and his 732 crewmates that she was in the centre of the fleet and never came under enemy fire, though between its two bursts of action the
Superb
passed close to the wreckage of the flagship
Invincible
, one of three British battle cruisers lost at Jutland. Men were in the chill water, clinging to flotsam and waving and cheering at the oncoming vessels. But the ships were ploughing ahead at full speed in a vast manoeuvre involving the whole Grand Fleet, and the men were swept under, or left bobbing in the wake. By the time the German fleet disengaged after nightfall, with the loss of just one of its own battle cruisers, over six thousand British seamen had been killed. All this overturned deeply held convictions that Britannia ruled the waves, even though it had kept its lead in the naval arms race against German rivalry during the run-up to the war. The news from Jutland, on the eve of Tolkien's departure for France, was a profound blow to morale.

When his train from London's Charing Cross Station pulled in to Folkestone at one o'clock the following Monday, Tolkien found a town transformed from the quiet port he had seen in 1912 on camp with King Edward's Horse. Now it was humming with activity, its hotels full of soldiers. He spent Monday night there and the next day, 6 June, boarded a troop ship that steamed across the Channel under escort by a destroyer. He watched the sea-birds wheeling over the grey waters and England recede, the Lonely Isle of his mythology.

Somewhere inland from the French shores ahead, Rob Gilson was making a thumbnail sketch that day of his battalion as they snatched a rest at the side of a long tree-lined road, with the yellow sun westering behind them. The Cambridgeshires had moved south from the lowlands of Flanders into rolling Picardy, the ancient region through which the Somme wound; G. B. Smith was close by. Christopher Wiseman, now back at Scapa Flow, was having a rather chillier time as he led a party of snotties that day onto Hoy, the tallest of the Orkney islands. Disaster had befallen the British High Command. Lord Kitchener, the man whose rallying cry had propelled their generation into military service, had sailed the same day for Russia, and his ship had struck a mine shortly after sailing from Scapa Flow. Wiseman's men were supposed to be searching for confidential documents that might have been washed ashore, but they found none; the snotties were more interested in hunting out puffins' eggs: to his great consternation, they were quite unperturbed by Hoy's 200-foot cliffs.

At Calais the soldiers returning from leave were sent straight off to their battalions, but those arriving for the first time were sent to Étaples, the British Expeditionary Force's base depot. ‘Eat-apples', as it was known to the insular Tommy, was a veritable prison, notorious for its vindictive regime. Fenced in among the shoreland sands and pines, it consisted of a sprawl of warehouses and the tented camps run by each army division, British, Canadian, South African, Australian or New Zealand. Now, transferred out of his training battalion, Tolkien bedded down that first night with other men bound for the 32nd Division, to
which G. B. Smith's 19th Lancashire Fusiliers belonged. But it proved a false start. The next day he was assigned to the 25th Division and the
11th
Lancashire Fusiliers, which had seen heavy, and costly, fighting at Vimy Ridge in May. Possibly the posting was connected with the fact that the 11th Battalion's signals officer, Lieutenant W. H. Reynolds, had been noticed for his exceptional work at Vimy and was about to be promoted above battalion level, thus creating a vacancy. But for Tolkien this was a blow to long-cherished hopes. To compound his bad luck, the kit he had bought at such expense on Smith's advice had disappeared in transit, forcing him to cobble together a whole new set of equipment, including camp-bed and sleeping bag, for nights under canvas in the chill of what turned out to be a most wintry June.

A message was sent off to tell the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers that he was there awaiting orders. The sense of edgy excitement evaporated, and Tolkien sank into boredom. Now he slept on the dusty hilltop where the 25th Division recruits were encamped, writing letters. To circumvent the censor, Tolkien adopted a code of dots by which Edith could locate him, and while he was in France she traced his movements on a large map pinned to the wall at Great Haywood. He was issued with a gas helmet (a chemically treated flannel bag with glass eyepieces and a valve for the mouth), the newly compulsory tin hat, and a rifle for drill. Every day he would march out in a column of over 50,000 men to the vast sandy bowl known as the Bull Ring, where he was mercilessly put through his paces along with hundreds of other officers. On days when it was not pelting with rain, the troops came back white with dust. The road to the Bull Ring passed the lines of many hospitals, and a huge military cemetery. Tolkien later recalled that his vision of a purgatorial encampment, the poem ‘
Habbanan
beneath the Stars', might have originated here.

Out of acute homesickness a new poem emerged, ‘
The Lonely Isle
', describing his sea-crossing from England, to which the verse is dedicated.

O glimmering island set sea-girdled and alone—

A gleam of white rock through a sunny haze;

O all ye hoary caverns ringing with the moan

Of long green waters in the southern bays;

Ye murmurous never-ceasing voices of the tide;

Ye plumèd foams wherein the shoreland spirits ride;

Ye white birds flying from the whispering coast

And wailing conclaves of the silver shore,

Sea-voiced, sea-wingèd, lamentable host

Who cry about unharboured beaches evermore,

Who sadly whistling skim these waters grey

And wheel about my lonely outward way -

For me for ever thy forbidden marge appears

A gleam of white rock over sundering seas,

And thou art crowned in glory through a mist of tears,

Thy shores all full of music, and thy lands of ease—

Old haunts of many children robed in flowers,

Until the sun pace down his arch of hours,

When in the silence fairies with a wistful heart

Dance to soft airs their harps and viols weave.

Down the great wastes and in a gloom apart

I long for thee and thy fair citadel,

Where echoing through the lighted elms at eve

In a high inland tower there peals a bell:

O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!

G. B. Smith sent condolences that the hoped-for summer with Edith at Great Haywood had been cut short and that Tolkien would not be coming to join him in the Salford Pals. ‘
I do pray for you
at all times and in all places,' he added, ‘and may you survive, and we survive the fiery trial of these events without loss of our powers or our determination. So shall all things be for good. Meanwhile trust God and keep your powder dry, and be assured that to three other men you are more than their own selves.'

By the middle of June it was clear that something major was
afoot in the counsels of the chiefs of staff. Rumours of spies abounded, but what was planned seemed public knowledge: a
‘show'
was to be launched somewhere near the Somme town of Albert at the end of the month. The ominous signs were apparent in a letter from Gilson thanking Tolkien for a note that had arrived as he came in from a trench working party on midsummer's night. A friend and fellow officer had been struck by shell fragments while on a working party, and was thought to be near death. Gilson had travelled far since his school debating days, when he had once asserted that ‘war was not now of the first importance, and…was a scientific contest of calculation rather than of personal prowess' – making it all sound rather bloodless. Now he wrote to Tolkien: ‘I have never felt more forcibly than in the last few weeks, the truth of your words about the oasis of TCBSianism. Life just now is a veritable desert: a fiery one. The TCBS never despised the ordeal and I don't think they underrated it, mine has of late increased in intensity. None the less I am cheerful enough and more grateful than I can say for the breaths of cool fresh air which the various members of the TCBS have given me from time to time.'

Gilson had been in and out of the trenches near Albert for weeks. Now that the news of Jutland had been recast in a more favourable light, and with Russia making sweeping gains on the Eastern Front, he was beginning to sense ‘the war at last moving – towards the end'. He found time to marvel at the broad cloud-strewn skies or at the gothic genius behind Amiens cathedral, where he had managed to snatch several happy hours. But he had seen nothing of Smith, though he knew him to be tantalizingly near. The leave he had been hoping for since March had been postponed indefinitely, and he was exhausted. Wiseman had confided in Tolkien that he feared for Rob's sanity. His real lifeline had been his correspondence not with the TCBS, but with Estelle King in Holland, yet twice now he had been disciplined by the censor for revealing too much about the military situation. ‘I feel now as if I hardly know what I might write of except the weather,' he told her. Often in his almost daily letters he bemoaned the callousness war had instilled in him,
but it was clearly a fragile veneer. ‘
When it comes down to
single human beings,' he wrote, ‘I can hardly bear the horror of this war. Men you have known and lived and worked with for eighteen months carried away on stretchers, bleeding. It makes me feel like “peace at any price”…It is all cold-blooded and horrible.'

Gilson told his father on 25 June that he could at least quash one bit of tittle-tattle with some confidence: that peace was being declared on the 26th. The incommunicable reality was rather different. On 24 June the massed British artillery had unleashed an unprecedented bombardment against seventeen miles of German trenches north of the River Somme. It went on steadily throughout the day, halving in force through the night but redoubling for ninety minutes the following morning. And so it was to continue every day: the prelude to the biggest battle the world had yet seen.

‘I often think,' Gilson told his father, ‘of the extraordinary walk that might be made all along the line between the two systems of trenches, that narrow strip of “No Man's Land” stretching from the Alps to the sea…' But out of the whole line it was just here, around the River Somme, that the Allies were aiming their might. The German invaders had marched over the region in 1914, but when their bid to encircle Paris failed they had fallen back to the low hills to the east of Albert, cutting an unyielding double line of trenches deep into the chalk. The French had dug a similar, though less extravagant, set of trenches opposite, but now they had retired to concentrate their forces south of the river, and Kitchener's armies had stepped in to the breach. The volunteers were not ready for battle, but Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, had agreed to commit these half-soldiers to a decisive attack before the French army could be wiped out at Verdun. Where the British and French lines met on the Somme, the hammerblow would fall.

At last the orders came from the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers summoning their new subaltern, and Tolkien left sand-blown Étaples
on Tuesday 27 June 1916, two days before the planned offensive. The unseasonal chill had given way to a summer heat interspersed with thundery showers. He slept on the train near Abbeville, but when it finally rolled in to Amiens the attack planned for Thursday had been postponed because of the weather. Tolkien ate a meal doled out at a field kitchen in the square, turned his back on the great cathedral, and marched up the road northward into the undulating cornfields and orchard-lands of Picardy, where cornflowers and poppies still bloomed blue and red, and feverfew and camomile and wormwood grew. But the skies opened, the road turned into a river, and he was drenched by the time he met up with his battalion.