Tolkien and the Great War (22 page)

At first nebulous and intensely witty, it then revolts against Tea-cake and Barrowclough and crystallizes it into a still intensely witty but less vapid TCBS. Finally the war. Now I think the TCBS is probably greatest in the third phase, but felt greatest in the first. We none of us had in those old days this horrible feeling of how puny, ineffectual and impossible we were. I don't know how far JR has been in this pot, but the revelation seems to have come most unpleasantly home to you and me, and if we don't look out we shall think of nothing else. On the other hand we
did very little except live in a state of acute tension, act the Rivals, clothe a Roman remain in trousers, run Latin debates, and have tea in the Library, which enormous works as they were compared to our present occupation were possessed of highly ‘factitious' greatness. In those days we stood on our heads; but one can't stand on one's head for ever. But I do believe we still have this advantage over other people, that when we want we can stand on our heads.

Wiseman was baffled by Tolkien's assertion that he no longer felt part of a ‘little complete body', and went on:

Speaking for myself I know that I belong to a coterie of three. Inside that coterie I find a real and absolutely unique inspiration…Now this coterie is for me quite sufficient. It is the TCBS. I don't see that there can yet be anything complete about the TCBS. We may have got rid of a lot of deliberate self-delusions, but I as yet see no reason to doubt that there is an achievement for our striving and a prize for our winning provided we are willing to pay the price. I cannot see that the TCBS is altered. Who is to say that we are less complete than we were? Or even if we are not, how does completeness, whatever it may be, affect the greatness of the TCBS? In the old days we could sit tight together and hug ourselves over the fire in the thought of what we were going to do. Now we stand with our backs to the wall, and yet we haver and question as to whether we had better not all put our backs against separate walls. Rob has shewn the temper of the steel we hold. Because he had got his prize so soon, is that a sign that the steel is less proof?

Don't imagine that Rob means nothing to me. He probably means more to me than to either of you. In the dark days of Teacakianism he was the only link I had with the TCBS. He used to see the TCBS more nearly as it was than any of us, I think. I cannot estimate how much I learned from Rob. I feel to have learned something from both you and JR, as how could I help doing. But Rob and I, and chiefly Rob, built up whole systems of thought which I find now part and parcel of my attitude to
nearly every question…And I totally and vehemently deny that, as you once said, in a recent letter, he never understood the TCBS so well as you or I or JR. He understood it better; for he understood JR better. And, if you report JR correctly, I begin to think he understood it less, confusing it with Pre-Raphaelite brotherhoods and associations of Old Edwardians under William Morris, which he originally introduced merely by way of comparison, and which I always thought and said were indifferent at that.

However all this may be, I know I am a TCBSite; I intend achieving greatness, and, if the Lord will, public notability in my country; thirdly, in any greatness I achieve you and JR will be indissolubly bound up, because I don't believe I could get on without you. I believe we are not now getting on without Rob; we are getting on with Rob. It is by no means nonsense, though we have no reason to suppose, that Rob is still of the TCBS. But I believe there is something in what the Church calls the Communion of Saints.

Receiving Wiseman's letter a fortnight or so later, Smith forwarded it to Tolkien with the words, ‘
On the constitution
of the TCBS I have nothing to add to what Chris says here, and what I have already said to you. My belief in it is undiminished.' The corollary to this is that when they parted some, at least, of Tolkien's doubts remained.

Smith and Tolkien ate a last meal together at Bouzincourt with Wade-Gery, the Oxford don-turned-captain, who (probably on this occasion) presented Tolkien with a volume of William Morris's
The Earthly Paradise
. But war was inescapable, and the omens poor, and even as they ate they came under enemy fire.

It is often said that Tolkien wrote the first stories of his mythology in the trenches.
‘That's all spoof,'
he cautioned fifty years after the event. ‘You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that's all. You couldn't write…You'd be crouching down among flies and filth.' After rejoining his battalion, he made revisions to ‘Kortirion among the Trees' during two days in a
dugout
in the Thiepval Wood front line; but none of the ‘Lost Tales' that form the basis for the much later ‘Silmarillion' can be dated from Tolkien's time in France, let alone from the trenches themselves. The first problem was finding the requisite concentration; then there was the strong risk of losing anything you had actually written. Rob Gilson had declared from the trenches: ‘
Some people talk
of reading books here, but I don't understand how they can manage it.' The voracious G. B. Smith managed to consume a great many books while in France, but after the loss of his long poem ‘
The Burial of Sophocles
' en route from England he was constantly concerned to send home anything he wrote. When he received Tolkien's ‘The Lonely Isle', he had made a copy of that too and sent it back to West Bromwich for safekeeping. Composing a sustained narrative was impossible amid the strain and interruptions of trench life. Picturing the elms of Warwick must have been challenge enough, for Thiepval Wood was far from tranquil. Edmund Blunden spoke of its ‘
ghastly gallows-trees
', while Charles Douie wrote in his war memoir,
The Weary Road,
‘
The wood was never
silent, for shell and rifle fire echoed endlessly through the trees, in testimony of the unceasing vigil of the opposing lines. At night the flares, as they rose and fell, threw the wood into deeper shadow and made it yet more dark and menacing.'

Elsewhere Tolkien did recall writing some of the mythology ‘down in dugouts under shell fire', but it can have been little more than jotted ideas, outlines, or names. The anxieties of war, however, stoked the creative fires. His mind wandered through the world that had started to evolve at Oxford and in the training camps, in his lexicon, and in his poems. As he later reflected, ‘
I think a lot
of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even “sleeping”.' He was conscious, in retrospect at least, that such activity constituted a minor dereliction of duty, and confessed guiltily, ‘It did not make for efficiency and present-mindedness, of course, and I was not a good officer…'

On the Western Front the present, for all its urgent terror, could not obscure the lamentable wreckage of the past all around, and even the recent past might seem bizarrely ancient. ‘
The Old British Line
,' Edmund Blunden observed, ‘was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is an obstinate remoteness about a skull.' Tolkien never merely observed the past. He recreated it in his own wayward imagination, focusing not on Troy but on Kortirion and, by now perhaps, on the great city of Gondolin too.

Some of those old bones protruding from the trench walls on the northern edge of Thiepval Wood were the relics, it may be, of men known to G. B. Smith when he first carried ‘Kortirion' around these same trenches ‘like a treasure' and headed off on night patrol exhorting Tolkien to publish. The line here had scarcely moved since Smith's winter vigil, but as Tolkien arrived
the day after his signalling course ended, Thursday 24 August 1916, a mile away the Germans finally relinquished most of the Leipzig Salient, the fortification that had defeated the Salford Pals on 1 July. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers let off smoke barrages in support of the attack (by battalions of Tolkien's division), drawing artillery fire from the Germans. The next two days poured with rain.

Relief on Friday took nearly five hours: not until the incoming battalion had filed in with all its gear and settled down could the Fusiliers squeeze past and stumble out into the dark trees. The process was ‘
always long
and a trial to the temper', Gilson had written, but ‘the joy of getting out of the trenches is quite indescribable…The removal of the strain of responsibility, though it be only partial, is like a great load off the mind.' They reached Bouzincourt at 1.30 in the morning on Sunday 27 August – only to be sent back to the front line after less than twenty-eight hours' respite, as Tolkien noted punctiliously, at the crack of dawn on Monday.

But now he was on the other side of the old No Man's Land, east of the Leipzig Salient in trenches that had been seized just hours before. His new home was strewn with the bodies of dead German soldiers. In the dugouts were prisoners, many of them wounded. It was, in the words of the chaplain, Evers,
‘an appalling bit of line…no better than a hen-run, with precious little protection'
. They were under shellfire, and to make a thoroughly miserable situation worse, the rain returned with a vengeance, turning the ground underfoot to a grey glue on the Tuesday. ‘
I feel that if I survive
this war the only classification of weather that will ever matter to me will be into dry and muddy,' Rob Gilson had written in March. ‘I could almost cry sometimes at the universal mud and the utter impossibility of escaping from it…' As the summer passed away, the Somme began to revert to that primeval ooze. The men, though, had at their command an ‘extraordinary cheeriness', as Evers said: ‘If one got at all down the cure was to go and visit the men in a dug-out; the worse the conditions the cheerier they were and one came away cheered up oneself.'

On Friday 1 September, Tolkien moved back to relief trenches around the charnel-house of Ovillers, and he did not reach his bivouac at Bouzincourt until the following Tuesday night.

Aside from its wine, which he liked, France can have given Tolkien small compensation for the miseries of war. He disliked the native language and detested French cooking. On his sole previous visit, in the summer of 1913 as tutor to two Mexican boys, his warm impressions of Paris had been marred by ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and the spitting and the indecency' of the Frenchmen in the streets, and he had been glad to leave for Celtic Brittany; but the trip had ended with one of the boys' aunts being run over by a car and fatally injured before Tolkien's eyes. If history had placed him in Saxony, defending the Weser against marauding Frenchmen, as the Lancashire Fusiliers had done in 1759, doubtless he would have been happier.

Yet Humphrey Carpenter, describing this attitude as ‘Gallophobia', surely pays too much attention to mischievous hyperbole (as he does regarding Tolkien's views on Shakespeare and Wagner). Later, Tolkien's knowledge of French extended to the niceties of dialectal Eastern Walloon pronunciation, according to his protégé and friend, Simonne d'Ardenne. Certainly, he felt a lingering attachment towards the region of France in which he served. In 1945 he wrote, ‘
I can see clearly
now in my mind's eye the old trenches and the squalid houses and the long roads of Artois, and I would visit them again if I could.'
^*
It is a nostalgia not for remembered happiness but for a lost intimacy, even with horror, drudgery, and ugliness.

For five mostly dry days in the second week of September 1916, the 25th Division clogged the long roads with its dusty columns of troops and horses and its lumbering lines of support vehicles as it hauled its serpentine bulk west. Tolkien was at last granted a respite after two months of fighting and trench-duty.
Many officers made such journeys on horseback; but, as it turned out, when he was in France he walked everywhere:
‘endless marching, always on foot,'
as his children recalled him saying, ‘sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going'.

At Franqueville, midway between the Western Front and the Atlantic, the division rested and trained from 12 September. By the end of the fortnight Tolkien had at his disposal six men freshly trained in visual signals. More importantly, he had been reunited with an old friend from Cannock Chase.

This was Leslie Risdon Huxtable. Raised in Tiverton, Devon, and nearly three years younger than Tolkien, he had thrown in his undergraduate studies at Cambridge to enlist, with his heart set on a rifle regiment. Instead he had been posted, within two weeks of the similarly disappointed Tolkien, for training with the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers. From Cannock Chase, Second Lieutenant Huxtable had made two trips to Otley in Yorkshire for signals training, and now (as it seems) he had been summoned to act as Tolkien's understudy, ready to take over as battalion signals officer should Tolkien be put out of action. He arrived at the right time: Tolkien had been at the sharp end of a disagreement with a superior. (‘I am intensely sorry to hear of your frictions with others,' Smith wrote. ‘I know how one officer can make a beast of himself to his junior, if he is swine enough to do so.' The battalion was temporarily in the hands of the twenty-year-old Captain Metcalfe, Bird having gone on leave for ten days.)
‘Hux'
, as Tolkien called him, joined him in ‘A' Company, and when the Fusiliers arrived back at Hédauville near the Somme front, on 26 September, the two shared a tent. During their time at rest, momentous and fateful events had transpired on the battlefield.

In 1945, Tolkien described the Second World War as ‘the first War of the Machines', noting that its close left ‘everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines'. By contrast, the conflict
of 1914-18 was a war of manpower against machines, of the old world against the new. By September 1916, the battle of the Somme had become, like the siege of Verdun, a ghastly and almost fruitless exercise in attrition. A major breakthrough by infantry advancing against the entrenched machine guns now seemed inconceivable, so instead the primary goal was to kill as many Germans as possible. Such vast squandering of young lives left an indelible mark on Tolkien's generation, who refused to commit their own sons to similar static bloodbaths in the next war. More often they put the machines in charge – the Flying Fortress, the doodlebug, the aircraft carrier, the A-bomb – pitting them against each other, or against civilians. But the tide of history turned at the Somme, with the advent of the tank.

Rumour was dominated by this new wire-crushing, trench-bridging, bullet-proof monster. It had been deployed by surprise on 15 September, and the third ‘big push' of the Somme offensive had swept the Germans back until the line ran for five miles due eastward from Thiepval. Over this ruinous shambles, once a pretty red-tiled village, the Fusiliers returning from the west could see the artillery blaze day and night. When they arrived back in Thiepval Wood, on Wednesday 27 September, the village had all but fallen. Some of its garrison had fought to the death; others had surrendered when a tank lumbered into view.

The wood had suffered in the attack: since Tolkien's last visit it had become a wilderness of toppled trunks and black stumps, hung with rags of bark. Battalion headquarters was now in a frontline trench north of the trees, so that Bird, the commanding officer, could see what was going on: here Tolkien had eight runners. The trench gave a vivid view on Thursday afternoon as waves of troops swept on from Thiepval in the first major attack on the Schwaben Redoubt.
^*

Late in the day the assault force sent a warning that Germans were making a getaway down the trenches opposite, which ran west to the Ancre. Ordered to head them off, three groups of
Fusiliers made to dash across No Man's Land and through a weak point in the wire. A machine gun started up, cutting down several men before the rest were told to hang back, but the first patrol was in the enemy trench and forcing a passage with grenades. They killed the machine gunners and the raid captured the Pope's Nose, a jocularly named but lethal salient in the enemy line. Throughout the night one of Tolkien's lance-corporals, thrown on his wits after a shell shattered his lamp, flashed his messages back across No Man's Land using a salvaged German torch. More than thirty prisoners had been taken; Tolkien, speaking German, offered a drink of water to a wounded
captive officer
, who corrected him on his pronunciation. Ironically, some of the captives belonged to a Saxon regiment that had fought side-by-side with the Lancashire Fusiliers at the Battle of Minden. But they were lucky to be alive: the Fusiliers had been told only days before that when ‘cleaning up' a captured trench, ‘If guards [are] insufficient, prisoners are often treacherous – so at times prisoners cannot be made.'

The captain who had led the Fusiliers' raid fell with a sniper's bullet through his head the next morning as he was returning to his own trench after delivering several more prisoners. Rain, mist, and smoke obscured visual signals all that day. Tolkien had a miraculous addition to his equipment, a new portable Morse telegraph set that could be used freely, unlike the conventional field telephone, because it did not leak its signal via the earth for all to hear. The ‘Fullerphone', though, was a rather complicated array,
^*
and in any case the line back through the wood was cut repeatedly by heavy shellfire.

The shells, of course, also found more grievous targets. Before
the raid, ‘A' Company had been threading its way through the trenches in the wood towards the front line when the leading subaltern, Rowson, stopped for a chat with the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bird (now back from leave). Huxtable, bringing up the rear, heard their voices, but shortly afterwards a message came down from the head of the column saying it was leaderless. A private who had been with Rowson described how they had just left the CO when a shell had burst between them: ‘I was blown up in the air without a wound in me…Directly I recovered myself from being covered with dirt I looked for the officer, he was no where to be seen.' The shell had simply annihilated Rowson.