Tolkien and the Great War (18 page)

The eight hundred or so men of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were lodged in barns at
Rubempré
, a cluster of old but sturdy farms north-east of Amiens and thirteen miles from the front. It was just about the cleanest and most comfortable spot in the British army area behind the Somme front line, but Tolkien had to set up his new camp bed on a farmhouse floor. Late in the evening, another battalion of the same brigade marched in, tired and muddy, only to be sent on elsewhere because there was no room left. Flashes of artillery fire lit up expanses of sky all through the night, accompanied only by an incessant dull thudding.

At seven o'clock the next morning, Thursday 29 June, to the accompaniment of intensive artillery fire away to the east, the men were outside for a last-ditch attempt to shape them up for combat. First they had an hour-long physical workout, then an hour of bayonet practice, drill, and marching ‘on the double'. About a quarter of the men were almost as new to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers as Tolkien, and four other officers had only arrived a day earlier. The commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Laurence Godfrey Bird, had stepped in less than two weeks previously. Most of the rest had been in France for nine months now, miners or weavers from the close-knit Lancashire towns of Burnley, Oldham, Bolton, Wigan, Preston, and Blackburn. North Lancashire miners also dominated a second battalion in the four-strong brigade, while a further battalion had been recruited largely from white-collar workers in the Wirral,
Cheshire. This was a migrant community exiled from home, without women or children or old people, and the vast majority had joined up in the first two months of the war, many of them in their mill clogs. They had embarked from England on the day of the Loos offensive, and tradition held that they had been meant for the battle there but had got lost in transit.

Tolkien felt an affinity with these working-class men. He had, after all, spent significant portions of his childhood either in run-down urban areas of Birmingham or among labouring folk in the villages on the outskirts of the city. But military protocol did not permit him to make friends among the ‘other ranks'. He had to take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters – the kind of job that would be done by any officer available, whether a
platoon command
er or not. If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty.

As before, however, he shared billets and meals and a social life with the thirty or so other officers, particularly those in the company to which he was assigned, ‘A' Company, who included several subalterns as platoon leaders under a captain. The brigade – the 74th – had been ‘stiffened' by the addition of a regular army battalion from the Royal Irish Rifles, and a handful of the officers in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had also been career soldiers before the war. The older officers ‘were in many cases professional soldiers dug out of retirement', notes Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Tolkien, ‘men with narrow minds and endless stories of India or the Boer War'. Such old campaigners Tolkien did not find so congenial: they treated him like an inferior schoolboy, he said. None of the officers he had got to know at Lichfield and Cannock Chase had been posted to the 11th Battalion, and he found he had little in common with many of the younger subalterns here. It became Tolkien's confirmed opinion that ‘the most improper job of any man…is bossing other men' and, he complained, ‘Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.'

The battalion was on short notice to move in case of a sudden change of plan, but the clouds lowered, the winds gusted, and no attack took place. The men were given no chance to sit
and brood on what lay in store for them in the coming days, and specialist officers gave instruction in machine-gunnery or bombing or (in Tolkien's case) signals. The following day, 30 June, there was more of the same. Several officers and men were handed awards for acts of bravery back at Vimy Ridge. The brigade broke camp and, under cover of darkness, made a three-and-a-half-hour march towards the flickering eastern horizon, halting at one o'clock in the morning in a larger village, Warloy-Baillon, seven miles from the front line. During the afternoon strong winds had dispersed the rain clouds and the word had gone out that the great assault was now set for the next morning. Tolkien's battalion was being saved for follow-up attacks. It was clear, however, that G. B. Smith's was not.

‘My dear John Ronald,' he had written five days earlier, in a letter that found Tolkien with his new battalion, ‘the very best of luck in all that may happen to you within the next few months, and may we live beyond them to see a better time. For although I do not set much store upon my own powers, I set great store upon the combined work of the TCBS. And because we have been friends God bless you and preserve you to return to England and your wife.

‘After which the Deluge. If ever there was an hour in which that old priceless humour of the TCBS had an opportunity of surmounting all obstacles thrown in its way, it now is upon us…I would have written more but have had no time. And you must expect none in the future…Goodbye in the TCBS.'

The same day, Rob Gilson had written to his father and to Estelle King describing a deserted and overgrown garden he had seen, ‘Larkspur and Canterbury-bells and cornflowers and poppies of every shade and kind growing in a tangled mass.'
^*

It was, he commented, ‘
One of the few
really lovely things that the devastation of war produces. There are many grand and awe-inspiring sights. Guns firing at night are beautiful – if they were not so terrible. They have the grandeur of thunderstorms. But how one clutches at the glimpses of peaceful scenes. It would be wonderful to be a hundred miles from the firing line once again.' Gilson wrote no valedictions. Pacing among the tents behind the ruins of Albert on one of those wet and muddy nights, he told a friend: ‘It is no use harrowing people with farewell letters; it is not as if we were prodigal sons. Those who survive can write all that is necessary.'

The first of July 1916 dawned with a light mist but with all the signs of a glorious summer's day. Hope ran high. Behind the front line, a great cavalry stood like something out of the old picture books, ready to ride through the breach the infantry would make. The army poised to fight had grown hugely since its losses at Loos last year. Three times larger than any army Britain had ever fielded, this was Kitchener's army, brought there by optimism and enthusiasm. New arrivals at Warloy, where Tolkien slept, were startled awake by the astonishing crash of artillery – ‘drum-fire', they called it – as the guns in the east launched into their morning cannonade. It went on for over an hour, towards the end somehow redoubling in fury. A Royal Flying Corps observer high above the Somme front said it was ‘as if Wotan, in some paroxysm of rage, were using the hollow world as a drum and under his beat the crust of it was shaking'.

A thousand yards from the German line, Rob Gilson and his battalion spent the night in and around the small château in trench-riddled Bécourt Wood, where his captain friend had been hit by shell-burst two weeks previously. Even here, despite the unrelenting British bombardment, war seemed remote. Cuckoos called, nightingales sang, dogs barked at the guns; wild and garden flowers grew in profusion. A light rain pattered through the leaves for soldiers to catch in their hats to drink. ‘Jerry' could scarcely have survived the merciless week-long bombardment and tomorrow would be a walkover. At breakfast in the
yard, spirits rose further still with the help of a dose of treacly army rum in the soldiers' tea. Rob's batman, Bradnam, packed his master's things and at five Gilson marched his platoon out of the wood along the trenches. Dressed not as an officer but as one of the men, so he would not be instantly shot down, Gilson, like everyone else, carried sixty-six pounds of gear. The Cambridgeshires arrayed themselves in trenches to the rear of another unit, from Grimsby. Gilson's platoon, composed largely of men from the Isle of Ely, was in his battalion's fourth and final ‘wave'.

At 7.20 a.m., ten minutes to ‘zero hour', every gun in the artillery accelerated to its maximum rate of fire in a hurricane bombardment. The air was brown with the chalk dust of disrupted fields and red with the pulverized brick of village and farmstead. Then, with two minutes to go, the ground reeled. Lieutenant Gilson and his men had been warned to expect this; they had been kept back to protect them from concussion. Across No Man's Land, and a little to Gilson's left, the earth erupted thousands of feet into the smoky blue air as twenty-four tons of explosive ammonal (ammonium nitrate mixed with aluminium) were detonated under the enemy trenches where they formed a strongly protected salient. Clods of soil and chunks of chalk rained down, as big as wheelbarrows.

For the first time in a week all the guns stopped. In No Man's Land, long ranks of men rose from where they had been crouching on the ground. The skirl of bagpipes started up nearby. The British artillery lengthened its aim so the infantry could safely enter the German front line. Then it resumed its bombardment. The shriek and roar pressed in from all around.

Gilson waited for the Cambridgeshires' third wave to leave. He checked his watch and, at two and a half minutes after zero hour, blew his whistle and waved his platoon forward some four hundred yards up to the front line.

Something was amiss. Now the space above his trench was alive with bullets, and shells the size of two-gallon oildrums sailed through the air, spinning with a sinister
wouf, wouf, wouf.
Nervous men, astonished that the pulverized enemy was firing
back, looked at each other; but they were ashamed to show their fear. Gilson spread the soldiers of his ‘
dear, stupid, agricultural platoon
' along a hundred-yard stretch of trench, checked his watch, and waved them up the ladders.

The German trench mortar shells, or ‘sausages', now somersaulting overhead had given their name to Sausage Valley, the shallow depression up which Rob Gilson and the Cambridgeshires were supposed to advance. Away to the left, beyond the rise on which stood the smashed enemy-held village of La Boisselle, it was paralleled by a further depression, Mash Valley. Beyond that, another entrenched spur ran out from the German-held high ground, and then there was the long dell containing Blighty Wood, so called because of the numbers of wounded who regularly left there bound for home. Here G. B. Smith and the Salford Pals were due to head across No Man's Land, two miles along the line to Gilson's left. Crammed into the trenches between the two TCBSites were eighteen whole battalions: men in their thousands from Tyneside and Devon, from Yorkshire, Scotland, Nottingham, and elsewhere. In the knotted trenches and the press of bodies, amid the killing cloud of artillery and the secrecy and confusion of the assault, those two miles might have been a million.

The Cambridgeshires were in extremis. Within an hour and a half, Rob Gilson's platoon was supposed to advance nearly two miles up Sausage Valley to an enemy strongpoint; in the plan, it had their regimental name on it: Suffolk Redoubt. The strongpoint lay just beyond a wood on the skyline, but as Gilson hauled himself out of the trench it is doubtful that he could see beyond the curtain of British shell explosions behind the German front line. That curtain – the barrage – would move in stages just in front of the advancing soldiers. It was in the plans. The bodies already strewn on the sweep of wasteland in front, up to the white lip of the newly blasted crater, were not. Nor was the
machine-gun fire cutting the air from La Boisselle. The artillery had failed to destroy or drive out the German defenders there.

Rob Gilson had half-predicted the problem. ‘
I am astonished
by the small material damage which a single shell, say a 4.2”, does,' he had written home. ‘If it explodes in the open it makes quite a shallow and small hole and throws the earth about a bit…But it does not look as if it had a radius of much more than 2 yards and one may burst just in front of, or even on, the parapet…without doing the smallest damage…On the other hand if a shell happens to explode right in a trench the damage it does to men is worse than I imagined.'

As soon as the barrage lifted from their front line, the Germans rushed from the dugouts in which they had crouched fearfully all week and took to their guns. No Man's Land was up to six hundred yards wide here, but soldiers from the foremost three waves of Cambridgeshires had begun to fall within the first hundred. They went down ‘
just like corn
in front of the farmer's reaper', one of Gilson's men remembered. Bullets spun men around and dropped them in strangely awkward postures; it felt like being hit by half a house. The enemy's shells dealt with those the bullets missed. But the advance went on, somehow: men with heads bowed as if walking into a gale. By the time Gilson led his platoon out, the machine-gunners had found their range and were working with improved efficiency.

Rob Gilson had described No Man's Land as ‘
the most absolute barrier
that can be constructed between men'. The details of what happened inside it seem almost an indeterminable mystery. Yet a captain friend, injured by a bullet ten minutes in, said he watched Gilson leading his soldiers forward
‘perfectly calmly and confidently'
. For Rob's batman Bradnam, time and distance stretched out: as he remembered it, Gilson was still moving forward at about nine o'clock and had advanced several hundred yards (which would have taken him beyond the German front line) when Bradnam himself was hit and cried out; but the orders were cruelly clear: nothing must stop the advance. Then Gilson's beloved old Major Morton was knocked out of action. His company was leaderless, and the Major passed on a
message to Gilson in the middle of No Man's Land to take over. He did so, and was moving forward again, as if on parade, when he and his sergeant-major, Brooks, were killed by a shellburst. A soldier crawling back told the injured Bradnam that his lieutenant was dead. Another said later that he found Gilson back in the front trench, as if he had been dragged or had dragged himself all the way back there; but there was no sign of life.

Far away, Rob Gilson's father, the Headmaster, was preparing to officiate at the King Edward's annual Sports Day. Rob's sister Molly was going to serve tea to the schoolboys' parents. His stepmother Donna, who usually handed out prizes, was giving it a miss this year and was going to ‘revel in a quiet and lovely afternoon' at home instead.

‘
I hope I may never
find myself in command of the company when we are in the trenches,' Gilson had once said. Such responsibility did not sit easily on him, but in his final minutes he had to lead the men he loved, and who loved him in return, into virtual annihilation. Many times he had told his fellow officers that he would rather die ‘in a big affair and not by a shell or chance bullet in the trenches'. But he was a gentle aesthete in the midst of absolute horror. His friend Andrew Wright, a fellow officer in the Cambridgeshires, told Gilson's father: ‘It was the final but not the first triumph of determination over his sensitive nature – He alone is brave who goes to face everything with a full knowledge of [his own] cowardice.'

Gilson did not live to see the full scale of the disaster that day. More than five hundred of the Cambridgeshires were wounded or killed. Of the sixteen officers the battalion had fielded, Gilson and three others died, two more were never found, and only one, Wright, emerged unhurt. No Man's Land was dotted everywhere with bodies. A dozen of the Cambridgeshires made it across to the edge of one of the enemy redoubts but were caught in the blast of a flamethrower and died horribly. Others made it behind the German lines but were hopelessly cut off. Later in the day the German machine gunners strafed
No Man's Land methodically, in zigzags, to finish off the wounded and stranded volunteers of Kitchener's armies.

On Sunday 2 July 1916, Tolkien attended
Mass
in front of a portable altar in a field at Warloy. The battalion's padre, Mervyn Evers, was a Church of England man, chirpy but averse to Roman Catholics. The brigade's Catholics, such as Tolkien, were ministered to by the chaplain with the Royal Irish Rifles. The British were rumoured to have taken the entire German frontline system, but no official news had come. All through Saturday the main road had carried an endless procession of troops and laden trucks heading for the front. There was also traffic in the other direction, including a few German prisoners, but it seemed that everything with wheels was being used to bring wounded men in to the temporary hospital at Warloy. The exodus continued unabated on Sunday, the second day of the battle. It was often tranquil apart from the humming of aeroplanes (two fought an inconclusive dogfight above the village), but every now and then the distant artillery would burst into deafening fusilades. In the afternoon the first official word came on progress so far: said to be ‘rather obscure'.

Through these days Tolkien and the Lancashire Fusiliers were held in a state of battle-readiness. A rumour arose that they were going into trenches near the German-held hamlet of Thiepval, but when the brigade left Warloy on Monday 3 July it was for Bouzincourt, a village three miles behind the front. In the dusk, as they set out, an exhausted Highland Division straggled past, broken by battle, its unshaven and mud-plastered men clutching each other for support.

Three miles was not far enough. Just before dawn, as Tolkien lay in a hut, a German field gun bombarded Bouzincourt. He was now on the Western Front, and it was his first time under fire. The tiny French farming village was not hit – fortunately, for soldiers filled its every house, cellar, barn, and orchard. When a thunderstorm broke out, the men of Tolkien's battalion were drenched where they lay out in a field. It rained still harder
throughout the next day, 4 July, which was spent largely cooped up because no one was allowed out from under the shelter of the village's trees for fear of enemy observation. But a ridge nearby offered a grandstand view of the battle line, on the hillside eastward across the wooded valley of the River Ancre, where shells could be seen bursting among the German trenches. The sky was no friendlier. At the front, Tolkien said, ‘
German captive-balloons
…hung swollen and menacing on many a horizon.' Men were arriving in their hundreds to have wounds dressed, but some were horribly mutilated. Rob Gilson's division had lost most heavily of all on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, but along the British front there had been 57,000 casualties: out of the 100,000 who entered No Man's Land, 20,000 had been killed and twice as many wounded. On the second day there were 30,000 more casualties.

In between training and instruction, Tolkien's battalion provided working parties to dig graves in the suddenly expanding cemetery. Units from his division had taken over the line from Gilson's last night; but what had become of him, and where was G. B. Smith? Tolkien looked over their letters: Smith's prayer that they might all survive
‘the fiery trial'
; Gilson's terse hints about his own harrowing
ordeal
; and Smith's 25 June warning about correspondence, ‘You must expect none in the future.'

On Wednesday afternoon, 5 July, orders came at last: the four battalions of Tolkien's brigade were needed to help another division that had suffered heavily in fighting at La Boisselle. That village had at last been taken, but fresh troops were needed to push further into enemy territory. They set out under Lieutenant-Colonel Bird at lunchtime on 6 July, but all ranks not required for combat were left behind. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers' signal officer, W. H. Reynolds, went to run communications at their trench headquarters, but Tolkien did not go with him. Instead he stayed put at Bouzincourt, along with the signal office running communications for the whole 25th Division. So he was still there when G. B. Smith arrived on 6 July.