Tolkien and the Great War (20 page)

One subaltern, a 30-year-old Lancastrian, died leading his platoon in the charge that night. Five officers were wounded. Tolkien, it seems, was there to wrestle with the muddled and inadequate communications system: a safer job, but certainly not peripheral. In this war of men and machines, the infantry counted little, the artillery rather more, and the word most of all: without fast and accurate communications, no one could hope to have the upper hand. A vast buried cable system had been installed prior to the Battle of the Somme, but of course it extended no further than the front line. Beyond its reach
soldiers worked in a zone of mystery, in which thousands of them simply disappeared. The job of the signaller was to shed some light on the mystery by helping to set up a battlefield communications system and using it.

In practice this was an almost hopeless task, as Tolkien learned at Ovillers. There were now surface lines running back to La Boisselle, and field telephones. The battalion's signallers carried coils of wire ready to set up new phone stations in captured territory. The surface lines, however, were easily tapped and Morse buzzers could be heard within three hundred yards as the signal leaked into the chalky ground. The phone was meant as a last resort, to be used with ‘station call signs' that Tolkien had to memorize (‘AE' for the Fusiliers, ‘CB' for the brigade, and so on). Flags, lamps, and flares simply drew fire from the enemy ramparts. Most messages were sent by runner, but runners were reluctant to run headlong across danger areas under fire. Orders from the generals at corps HQ took at least eight hours to reach the attacking troops.

The three battalions fell back; there would be no more attacks that night. Saturday 15 July broke grey and misty over the slope up to Ovillers, strewn with fallen figures. The Fusiliers left one company to hold the forward trench and drew back to a safer distance. In the afternoon they returned to La Boisselle to provide carrying parties for their own brigade, which now took over the siege.

Daylight only reinforced the sense of horror brooding over the desolation. The artist Gerald Brenan, likening it to ‘
a treacherous, chaotic region
recently abandoned by the tide', recalled that the ground between the two villages was ‘torn up by shells and littered with dead bodies, some of which had been lying around for three weeks…In the first attack on 1 July it had been impossible to rescue the wounded and one could see how they had crowded into shell-holes, drawn their waterproof sheets over them and died like that. Some of them – they were north-country lads – had taken out their Bibles.' The forest of barbed wire towards
Ovillers was thick with bodies, their faces purple-black. ‘
The flies were buzzing
obscenely over the damp earth,' Charles Carrington recalled; ‘morbid scarlet poppies grew scantily along the white chalk mounds; the air was thick and heavy with rank pungent explosives and the sickly stench of corruption.'

But there were rumours of a great cavalry breakthrough at High Wood to the east, and at least the enemy artillery was no longer shelling La Boisselle. The German dugouts were also quite secure, barring a direct hit on the entrance.
‘Ours compared very unfavourably…a hole dug out of the side of the trench with a bit of corrugated iron for its use, whereas theirs led down by steps some fifty feet or so and were even lit by electric light,'
the Fusiliers' padre, Evers, wrote later. ‘When one compares their arrangements with ours one wonders how in all conscience we managed to win the war!' Here a garrison had laid low under the great bombardment: a rank smell of sweat, wet paper, and unfamiliar foods pervaded the subterranean halls, and they were filthy. Tolkien found a space in one of these dugouts and bedded down.

His battalion was called out again that evening to line up in reserve in the trenches to the right of the Roman road. Now the Royal Irish regulars were up ahead holding the British forward trench. The attack was set for ten o'clock, but then postponed for three hours. The was a hint of drizzle in the air. The German resistance seemed undented, and the charge proved a virtual re-run of the night before. This time, though, the Fusiliers watched the
Sturm und Drang
from the rear. Among the orders that Tolkien passed was one for fifty men from ‘A' Company to go to the ammunition dump near La Boisselle to collect bombs for the fighting line. But signals problems recurred and it was an hour or more before news reached the division back at Bouzincourt that the attack had failed. None of its objectives had been gained, and its sole success – distracting the Germans so that a British battalion could cut them off from behind – almost proved disastrous.

A battalion to the right, the Warwickshires, had reached unopposed a trench running north-east from Ovillers – the Germans' final link with reinforcements and rations; but when
the bleared sun rose on 16 July, the Warwickshires were stranded. ‘To look for help we must turn back across the 1,000 yards of rough grass, impassable by day, which we had rushed across at night,' wrote Charles Carrington, who was one of the officers in the stranded battalion, in a memoir. Prussian Guardsmen were now sniping and throwing bombs at them in a bid to relieve the embattled garrison.

Through the muggy day, Tolkien's brigade tried to reach the Warwickshires from their position in front of Ovillers. There could be no daylight charge across open ground, so the Lancashire Fusiliers brought up bombs, which the Royal Irish hurled around the guarded angle of their trench at the German defenders. But the enemy had roofs and deep dugouts, and retaliatory bombs wore the Royal Irish down.

Tolkien's battalion finally broke the deadlock as the day ran out, sending in fresh men with a rain of rifle- and hand-grenades. Just before sunset a white flag appeared, followed by a soldier in field-grey. So the garrison of Ovillers surrendered: 2 officers and 124 soldiers, all unwounded. The Fusiliers pushed on until they reached the stranded Warwickshires and came back out of Ovillers with trophies: machine guns and other
matériel.

By the time the last pockets of resistance were driven out the next day, Monday 17 July, Tolkien was asleep. He had been relieved an hour after midnight and reached Bouzincourt at six o'clock, after some fifty hours in battle.

In the midst of his own trials at Ovillers, five days earlier, G. B. Smith had sent him a field postcard – the official kind printed with various routine messages to be deleted as appropriate – declaring simply ‘
I am quite well
'. Arriving at Bouzincourt Tolkien found a letter from him. Smith had returned from Ovillers just as Tolkien was going in, and on Saturday he had seen in the newspaper Rob's name among the lists of dead. ‘I am safe but what does that matter?' he said. ‘Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news. Now one realises in despair what the TCBS really was. O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?'

The Somme offensive had been a secret so widely shared that the name ‘Albert' was on everyone's lips back in England well before 1 July 1916. News of the attack broke the afternoon of that terrible Saturday, but there was no indication of casualties or intimation of disaster. The following Thursday Cary Gilson arrived back with his wife from a trip to London to find a multiple-choice
field postcard
from his son stating, ‘I am quite well. Letter follows at first opportunity.' That evening the Headmaster wrote a teasing reply mentioning a family friend who ‘never sends anything but cards, and never crosses out anything, so that each missive announces his perfect health, the fact that he is wounded and has been conveyed to a base hospital, etc.' Reflecting the general view that 1 July had been a turning point, he added: ‘The Germans have the wolf at their door.' But by now family after family had heard of the loss or injury of a son. The Gilsons knew Rob had been around Albert. On Friday 6 July, Rob's stepmother Donna could hardly bear to go home because she felt sure a War Office telegram would be awaiting her. On the Saturday a letter arrived that dashed all hopes. Arthur Seddon, one of Rob's best friends among the Cambridgeshire Battalion officers, sent condolences on his death.

Cary Gilson mastered or masked his grief with expressions of glorious sacrifice, and busied himself making further inquiries and writing an
obituary
. Rob's sister Molly threw herself into her war work, dressing wounds at the hospital set up in Birmingham University. But Rob's half-brothers, six-year-old Hugh and John,
not quite four, wept bitterly when they learned their beloved ‘Roddie' was gone. Donna was crushed by the loss of her ‘greatest friend'. She prayed that Estelle King, who happened to be on her way back from Holland, had not seen the newspapers.

Seddon's letter said that Rob ‘
was loved by all those
with whom he came into contact'. The loyal Bradnam declared that he had been ‘loved by all the men in the platoon and, I may say, company, as he was a very good officer and a good leader.' Old Major Morton said Gilson had been like a son to him, adding: ‘I am almost glad to be incapable of going back to my company, I feel I should miss him so at every turn.'
^*
Wright, the subaltern who had shared huts and billets with Gilson for eighteen months, wrote that their friendship had been ‘everything to me in a life I cannot love' and said, ‘I looked forward to a time when it should grow to immeasurable maturity in days of Peace.'

For Tolkien, as for Gilson's friends in the Cambridgeshires, personal loss was piled on top of the horror and exhaustion of battle. There was no counselling for bereavement or post-traumatic stress in this army; it was business as usual. But by chance Tolkien was given a brief respite after his arrival back in Bouzincourt from the attack on Ovillers. That night, Monday 17 July 1916, he bivouacked at Forceville, on the road to the elegant country town of Beauval, where the 25th Division moved for a rest fifteen miles from the front. After an inspection by the divisional commander on 19 July, Tolkien sat down to dinner with the other officers of ‘A' Company – those that were left. The man who commanded the company when Tolkien had joined it was already dead. Two subalterns had been packed off
wounded four nights ago from Ovillers (Waite, a Lincolns Inn lawyer, having taken a couple of bullets in his abdomen and hip). That left Fawcett-Barry, an army careerist earmarked as the new company commander; Altham, the intelligence officer, from battalion headquarters; Captain Edwards, the machine-gun officer, also from headquarters and just nineteen years old; plus the recent arrivals – Tolkien, Loseby, and Atkins. Tolkien appears to have been mess officer that day. Dinner and whiskey were served by the batmen, Harrison, Arden, and Kershaw.

The batman performed domestic chores for an officer: making his bed, tidying and polishing, and furnishing his table with the best. This was a practical arrangement, not just a luxury. Officers undoubtedly led a cushier life than the other ranks, but they had little time to spare from training, directing working parties, and, on ‘days off', censoring the men's inevitable letters home (a deeply divisive and unpopular duty). A resourceful batman could win a great deal of gratitude and respect. Tolkien, who found it hard to warm to his fellow officers, developed a profound admiration for the batmen he knew. However, the batman was not primarily a servant but a private soldier who acted as a runner for officers in action. As such he had to be both fit and intelligent so that he did not garble the orders or reports. Like any other private, he also fought in the field. One of the ‘A' Company batmen, Thomas Gaskin, a working-class Manchester man, was among the thirty-six Fusiliers killed or missing at Ovillers. Tolkien preserved a poignant letter from Gaskin's mother asking about her son.

The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered 267 casualties in a fortnight. At that rate, without fresh drafts and a lengthy break from combat, the unit would have ceased to exist in another month; but the battalion had to be reorganized at Beauval because of its losses.

At the same time, Tolkien was appointed battalion signal officer (and probably
acting lieutenant
). His predecessor left to work for the brigade and Tolkien was put in charge of all the unit's communications, with a team of non-commissioned officers and privates to work for him as runners, wirers, and
telephone operators and to help him set up signal stations wherever the battalion moved. It was a heavy responsibility at a difficult time. He needed to know the locations and station calls of all coordinating units; to be
au fait
with the plans and intentions of Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, the CO; and to keep the brigade informed about any unit movements or signals problems. But all this information had to be kept a close secret. The first soldiers to penetrate Ovillers had made an unpleasant discovery among the enemy papers: a verbatim transcript of the British order to attack the village on 1 July. Signalling was the focus of fresh paranoia, and was under severe scrutiny from above. There were lectures for officers and tickings-off for battalion commanders about the ineffective use of signals on the Somme.

Tolkien stepped up to his new role on Friday 21 July 1916, just in time to make even more of a challenge of his first experience of that staple of life on the Western Front, trench duty. That Sunday, the next phase of the Somme offensive was launched, a furious and tragically costly attack on Pozières, up the Roman road from Albert, by Australian volunteers fighting for King and motherland. On 24 July, Tolkien's unit was called instead to trenches at the north of the Somme front. Here near Auchonvillers – inevitably dubbed by the troops ‘Ocean Villas' – another great mine had been exploded at the start of the Big Push, but no ground had been gained. Tolkien was on the old front line facing Beaumont-Hamel, a German position nestled in a deep gash. To the south-east the land dipped steeply to the Ancre, and beyond it, two miles away, the Schwaben Redoubt hunched above the battlefield, at the high head of Thiepval Ridge. The Fusiliers were welcomed by shellfire as they were settling in. In the dugout of battalion headquarters Tolkien worked alongside Bird, his adjutant Kempson, Altham the intelligence officer, and John Metcalfe, who had become one of the army's youngest captains after running away from home to enlist and was now acting as second-in-command to Bird. Over the next five days Tolkien ran communications to the brigade command post in a village a mile and a half off, and the Royal Engineers came to lay a new cable. The Fusiliers were busy, especially after dark,
digging deep dugouts and widening the trenches for use in a later attack. The working parties were spotted one night and shells cascaded about them.

The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were withdrawn from ‘Ocean Villas' on the morning of 30 July and went into divisional reserve in a wood near the village of Mailly-Maillet. Regimental battle honours were celebrated on Minden Day, 1 August, the anniversary of the Battle of Minden of 1759 in which the Lancashire Fusiliers had helped defeat the French. There was a rose for every soldier – and blindfold boxing, an apt though unintentional parody of the Somme. After a hot and busy week (the soldiers were repairing trenches by night) they were pulled out of reserve on Saturday 5 August to a camp another few miles back, and the next day Tolkien was able to attend Mass in the Roman Catholic church at the village of Bertrancourt.

On Monday morning Tolkien was ordered to go with one other subaltern, Second Lieutenant Potts, and five sergeant-majors to set up battalion headquarters in trenches yet further north, near the ruined
sucrerie
or sugar beet refinery and the new mass grave between Colincamps and the German trenches at Serre. They found the front line itself badly blown-in and impassable by daylight, having been virtually obliterated at the start of the Somme. Nevertheless the battalion had to follow Tolkien's advance party in and set to work with pick and shovel amid intermittent bombardments that killed four men. But on 10 August, a day of rain, the Fusiliers marched back to Bus-lès-Artois, where they had stayed
en route
from Beauval to their first stint of trench-duty. From this vantage point, war seemed far away; cornfields rolled into the distance, and gardens and orchards concealed the surrounding villages. As before, they were lodged in huts in a wood on the northern edge of the village. For two nights, however, Tolkien sat out under the wet trees, deep in thought.

A note from G. B. Smith had reached him some two weeks earlier, voluble in its brevity. He had been re-reading a
poem
by Tolkien about England (probably ‘The Lonely Isle'): one of
the best, he said. But Smith's note carried no reference to Gilson's death, nor any indication of what Tolkien had written in response to the news. The impression is of thoughts inexpressible or shut away, and vitality sapped.

Since then he had forwarded a brief letter from Christopher Wiseman regarding Rob's death. The two were in agreement: weighed in the scales of life, Gilson for all his flaws was as gold compared to the drossy mass of people. In Smith's words, ‘
such a life
, even though its accomplishment was nothing, even though it passed almost unseen, even though no guiding principle ruled it and marked it out, even though doubt and misgiving, storm and stress raged always in his developing mind, is in the sight of God and all men worthy of the name of a value inconceivably higher than those of the idle chatterers who fill the world with noise, and leave it no emptier for their loss. Because the nobility of character and action once sent into the world does not return again empty.'

Tolkien had replied in a similar vein. Regarding, presumably, those same ‘idle chatterers', the journalists and their readers whom Smith execrated, he wrote that ‘No filter of true sentiment, no ray of real feeling for beauty, women, history or their country shall ever reach them again.' Evidently all three were in the grip of the anger that comes with grief. Their choice of target was entirely in keeping with TCBSian precepts. After all, the TCBS had vied against the boorish and empty-headed set at school, and the Council of London had cast out T. K. Barnsley and his fellow ironists. This is the spirit in which Smith wrote,

Save that poetic fire

Burns in the hidden heart,

Save that the full-voiced choir

Sings in a place apart,

Man that's of woman born,

With all his imaginings,

Were less than the dew of morn,

Less than the least of things.

At the same time, war-propaganda and its consumers were regularly demonized by soldiers of the Great War. The feeling arose from a combination of factors: knowledge that the propaganda was false, suspicion that those at home would never comprehend the reality of the trenches, and bitterness that friends and heroes died while the profiteers and their dupes sat in comfort and safety. The mood finds its most famous expression in Siegfried Sassoon's ‘
Blighters
', a mortal curse upon music-hall jingoists (‘I'd love to see a tank come down the stalls, / Lurching to ragtime tunes…'). Smith expressed an apocalyptic variant in ‘
To the Cultured
':

What are we, what am I?

Poor rough creatures, whose life

Is ‘depressing' and ‘grey',

Is a heart-breaking strife

With death and with shame

And your polite laughter,

Till – the world pass away

In smoke and in flame,

And some of us die,

And some live on after

To build it anew.

A glance across the Channel to these ‘cultured' rich and those ‘idle chatterers' was enough to confirm that, although Rob Gilson was dead, his worth outlived him.

Wiseman found further consolation in one of Gilson's sentiments, that ‘
the entirety
of the TCBS was its whole value to itself': in other words, its point was simply the best kind of fellowship. It is indeed hard to escape the impression that constant reference to the impersonal initials ‘TCBS' in the correspondence between the four was a way of concealing the mutual affection these young men felt towards each other. Yet Gilson's sentiment ran counter to the vision they had also shared of ‘
the great work
' they would ultimately do together. It was truly the sentiment of a ‘doubting Thomas', as Smith described Gilson,
and it implied that what the TCBS achieved in life mattered not a jot.

Tolkien had posted Wiseman's letter back to Smith, adding his own underlinings and annotations. With these he now found that he disagreed. He could scarcely express much of what had gone through his mind since then. He felt hungry, lonely, and powerless, and oppressed by
‘the universal
weariness of all this war'. Despite rumour, he had no more idea of the battalion's next move than of Smith's whereabouts; but following his vigil in the wood, Tolkien wrote a long letter amid the noise of several meals in the company mess. ‘I have lots of jobs on,' he said before he signed off. ‘The Bde. Sig. Offr. is after me for a confabulation, and I have two rows to have with the QM and a detestable 6.30 parade – 6.30pm of a sunny Sabbath.'
^*
His declaration to Smith was austere. ‘I have sat solemnly down and tried to tell you drily just what I think,' he admitted. ‘I have made it sound very cold and distant.'