Tolkien and the Great War (21 page)

Gilson had achieved the greatness of sacrifice but not, Tolkien wrote, greatness of the particular sort the TCBS had envisioned. ‘The death of any of its members is but a bitter winnowing of those who were not meant to be great – at least directly,' he said. As for the fellowship that had shared those dreams, Tolkien's conclusion was no less stark.

So far my chief impression is that something has gone crack. I feel just the same to both of you – nearer if anything and very much in need of you…but I don't feel a member of a little complete body now. I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended…I feel a mere individual…

Wiseman indeed had placed such faith in God's plan for the four that he had denied any might die before its fruition. If it
was God's purpose that the TCBS should do some work as a unity, he had written back in March,
‘and I can't help thinking
it is, then He will hear our prayer and we shall all be kept safe and united until it is His pleasure to stop this eruption of Hell.' Wiseman's worst apprehensions had indeed been focused on Gilson, but they had been of an entirely different nature. ‘He will come out of this an enormous man…if he can keep his senses,' he had added. ‘Insanity is what I fear most.' The expression
shell shock
had now entered the English language. In fact Gilson's foresight had been the clearer: the TCBS faced an enormous task, he had said; ‘
we shall not see it
accomplished in our lifetime'. But Tolkien's declaration at Bus-lès-Artois flew in the face of G. B. Smith's most solemn convictions. Facing the horror of a night patrol back in February, Smith had stated expressly that ‘
the death of one
of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS…Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!'

G. B. Smith had learned of Rob's death at the end of an ordeal at Ovillers probably more hellish than Tolkien's. The Salford Pals, half the battalion they had been at the start of the Somme offensive, had succeeded in seizing the south-west corner of the German stronghold during three days and nights of bayonet-fighting and bomb-throwing in smashed trenches. Enemy snipers had been ceaselessly active, claiming many victims. Smith, as intelligence officer, had questioned a group of German soldiers who were caught as they tried to flee. The interrogation was not harsh. ‘They were lost, nearly surrounded, and hungry and thirsty,' he wrote in his report. But other duties were nightmarish: he had to collect letters and papers from the wounded and dead Prussian Guards (some killed up to two weeks previously in the great bombardment), and examine identity discs for information about the enemy's deployments. And trenches the Pals took were choked with
corpses
.

‘
I am truly afraid
we can't possibly meet,' Smith had written
in his taciturn note about ‘The Lonely Isle'. He had then been thirty miles away from the Somme, and on the verge of moving elsewhere again for a while. Immediately after Ovillers, the Salford Pals had marched north, but at the end of July they had left their brigade and moved on to retrain under the Royal Engineers as a ‘pioneer' battalion. Tough men, largely recruited from the coalfields, they had long been marked down for this: pioneers carried out an infantry division's heavy labour. Smith (though Tolkien did not know it) was now back, based in Hédauville not far from Bouzincourt. Half the Pals were running a supplies railway in the wood west of the Ancre, near where they had spent the night before the Big Push. The other half were excavating new trenches on the other side of the river and out to the eastern tip of Blighty Wood, where hundreds of their friends and comrades had been shot down on the first day of the great battle. The men worked under sporadic shellfire.

Now Smith desperately wanted to see Tolkien. ‘
Tonight I cannot sleep
for memories of Rob and the last time I saw him,' he wrote on 15 August. ‘I wish I could find you – I search for you everywhere.' Three days later he received Tolkien's obituary on the TCBS. He disagreed with it at almost every point.

As chance would have it, that day Tolkien's division moved its headquarters to Hédauville. Its battalions were going to take over a two-mile stretch of the front line from the fighting units of Smith's division. Accordingly, the following afternoon, Saturday 19 August, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers marched into Hédauville and set up their tents south of the village,
en route
to the trenches. Smith went looking for Tolkien, but was told that he was away on a course.

The 25th Division had recalled all its battalion signal officers that Wednesday for a week of instruction, during which they were taught the error of their ways: their messages were too wordy, their phone calls too long, their battlefield stations too conspicuous; they relied too heavily on their runners and too little on their pigeons. But there was good news for Tolkien and the other battalion signal officers. Amid the enormous losses
on the Somme, some of them had been made to fill in for fallen company commanders, but as part of the ongoing shake-up in communications this was now stopped.

Failing to find his friend, Smith decided forthwith to communicate his righteous anger by mail. ‘I want you to regard this rather violent letter as a sort of triumphal ode to the glorious memories and undiminished activity of RQG who although gone from among us is still altogether with us,' he wrote. He was returning Tolkien's long letter – with the addition of some ‘rather curt and perhaps rude' annotations. ‘We are sure to meet presently, to which I enormously look forward. I am not quite sure whether I shall shake you by the hand or take you by the throat…'

The chance to find out arose that day. Tolkien was at Acheux, less than three miles away, and in the event the two finally caught up with each other. Signal instruction detained Tolkien when his battalion moved into the trenches, and from Saturday until the course ended he was able to see Smith every day.

Three issues were at stake: the ‘greatness' of Rob Gilson, the purpose of the TCBS, and whether the club had survived his death. Smith was furious that Tolkien had concluded their friend was ‘not meant to be great' and had responded with the question: ‘Who knows whether Rob has not already spread an essence as widely as we ever shall…?' (The frankly stricken letters from Rob's fellow Cambridgeshires to Cary Gilson suggest that this was not mere sentimentality: the Headmaster's son clearly affected many friends deeply.) ‘He certainly was a doubting Thomas,' Smith added, ‘but…I never expect to look upon his like again.'

He had missed Tolkien's point. Death had prevented their friend from taking his ‘holiness and nobility' and his inspirational qualities to the wider world. ‘His greatness is in other words now a personal matter with us,' Tolkien said, ‘but only touches the TCBS on that precise side which perhaps…was the only one that Rob really felt – “Friendship to the Nth power”.'

The essence of TCBSianism was more than friendship, he reminded Smith. ‘What I meant, and thought Chris meant, and am almost sure you meant, was that the TCBS had been granted some spark of fire – certainly as a body if not singly – that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world; that the TCBS was destined to testify for God and Truth in a more direct way even than by laying down its several lives in this war…'

Both he and Smith had already begun, through their literary efforts, to strive for this goal. Smith too believed in the ‘poetic fire'; but Tolkien was simply determined that it should not remain ‘in the hidden heart', as it did in Smith's poem.

So soon after Gilson's death, quite understandably, dreams of future achievement scarcely mattered to Smith. ‘As to the winnowing of the TCBS,' he said, ‘I really do not care two straws. It only refers to its executive capacity…' The group was spiritual in character, ‘an influence on the state of being', and as such it transcended mortality; it was ‘as permanently inseparable as Thor and his hammer'. The influence, he said, was ‘a tradition, which forty years from now will still be as strong to us (if we are alive, and if we are not) as it is today…'

In truth this is perhaps what Tolkien wanted to hear. His letter from Bus-lès-Artois is not the cold-eyed assessment of harsh realities it sets out to be. Rather, it is the letter of a devout man trying hard to find a divine pattern behind an ostensibly senseless and cruel waste. But its logic appears flawed: after all, if Rob Gilson was not meant to be great, why should his death end the TCBSian dream of achieving greatness as a unity? Furthermore, the letter undergoes a dramatic volte-face. Immediately after declaring ‘I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended', Tolkien had added a caveat: ‘but I am not at all sure that it is not an unreliable feeling that will vanish – like magic perhaps when we come together again…' Furthermore, he had conceded, ‘the TCBS may have been all we dreamt – and its work in the end be done by three or two or one survivor…To this I now pin my hopes…' The indications are that what Tolkien wanted, in his isolation and grief and doubt, was not
agreement that the TCBS had ended, but reassurance that it still lived.

For Smith, at least, the argument had put an
end to doubt
: his mind was made up about Rob's value and the role of the TCBS, and of these things he was glad. Yet although he claimed to care so little for the ‘executive' aspects of the TCBS, he had in fact been doing some writing since he and Tolkien last met. Among his poems are two brief elegies to Gilson: reflexes of grief, but also responses to the inspiration that had fired Tolkien, too, since the Council of London. One piece declares a stark view of divine providence: Gilson's death is
‘a sacrifice of blood outpoured'
to a God whose purposes are utterly inscrutable and who ‘only canst be glorified / By man's own passion and the supreme pain'. The other betrays Smith's urgent nostalgia:

Let us tell quiet stories of kind eyes

And placid brows where peace and learning sate:

Of misty gardens under evening skies

Where four would walk of old, with steps sedate.

Let's have no word of all the sweat and blood,

Of all the noise and strife and dust and smoke

(We who have seen Death surging like a flood,

Wave upon wave, that leaped and raced and broke).

Or let's sit quietly, we three together,

Around a wide hearth-fire that's glowing red,

Giving no thought to all the stormy weather

That flies above the roof-tree overhead.

And he, the fourth, that lies all silently

In some far-distant and untended grave,

Under the shadow of a shattered tree,

Shall leave the company of the hapless brave,

And draw nigh unto us for memory's sake,

Because a look, a word, a deed, a friend,

Are bound with cords that never a man may break,

Unto his heart for ever, until the end.

So ‘the fourth' could return even now to be present at the conclaves of ‘we three together' and, in Smith's view, the TCBS could remain whole. Is there some consolatory glimpse here, too, of a gathering of the spirits of dead men, as Tolkien visualized in ‘Habbanan beneath the Stars'? If so, the impression is confounded with one much more bleak: that ‘the company of the hapless brave' resides not in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, but here on Earth, in the battlefield graves of the Somme. Such a reading suggests that in Smith, as in many of his contemporaries, there lurked by now the seeds of a rationalist despair. In the meantime, the old beliefs were intact. With Gilson's silent blessing, the TCBS could go on to tell their stories, not of war, but of peace and the good old days.

Those days were growing increasingly remote. Rob's father had replied to a letter of condolence from Tolkien with the news that Ralph Payton had also died.
W. H. Payton
, the elder brother and the TCBS's old ‘Whip', was safely in Burma working for the Indian Civil Service, but ‘the Baby' had been killed on 22 July. The 1st Birmingham Battalion,
^*
also home to several other Old Edwardians, had been positioned south-east along the Somme line from La Boisselle. Like Tolkien, they had not taken part in the 1 July attack but had been sent into action in the wake of the Bastille Day offensive. Ralph, now a lieutenant in charge of the battalion machine gunners, had been in a night assault on high ground between High Wood and Delville Wood, amid the carcasses of horses killed in the Somme's only cavalry charge.
The 1st Birmingham Battalion had been all but destroyed in what was now a familiar story. The attack had been hastily prepared, and the artillery had failed to destroy the German defences. Almost two hundred of the battalion were slaughtered; Payton was never found. A rather shy and nervous humorist, he had taken on the burden of running the King Edward's
debating society
after the death of Vincent Trought in 1912. At Birmingham gatherings of the larger TCBS at Barrow's Stores, before the Council of London, he had been, in Wiseman's words, ‘the Barrovian-par-excellence'.

‘Heaven grant that enough of you may be left to carry on the national life,' said Cary Gilson, who had led a minute's silence at the school's annual
Speech Day
at the end of July 1916 to the memory of the forty-two Old Edwardians who had been killed in the previous twelve months. ‘Would to God that we men “past military age” could go and do this business instead of you young fellows. We have had a good innings: there would be little difficulty in “declaring”.' The Headmaster thanked Tolkien heartily for his sympathy, and said that Rob had left him several books and drawings.

Christopher Wiseman wrote to Smith expressing envy over his
‘frequent meetings with JR'
. His letter appears to have been the last word in the debate over whether the TCBS lived or died, and deserves to be quoted at length. Gilson's death had left Wiseman reflecting on the clique's history: