Tolkien and the Great War (23 page)

About the same time, Tolkien was passed a letter from the wife of a signaller, Private Sydney Sumner. ‘I have not heard from him for this long time but we have had news from the army chaplain that he has been missing since July the 9th,' she wrote. ‘
Dear Sir
I would not care if I only knew how he went. I know they cannot all be saved to come home…' Replying to such pitiable letters (Sumner had left a one-year-old daughter too) was one of the hardest tasks a sensitive officer faced; Tolkien preserved several of them.

Not far from the lines that Tolkien's battalion held late in September 1916 stands the Thiepval Memorial, inscribed with more than seventy thousand names. Many of these belong to unidentified bodies buried under the simple white stones in 242 cemeteries dotting the rural landscape of the Somme; the others belong to soldiers who, like Rowson, vanished without trace.
^*

After six days' rest, mostly at Bouzincourt, where he again shared a tent with Huxtable, Tolkien was sent back into the line with the Fusiliers, and from now on he lived almost constantly in a dugout. The tanks had not, after all, brought the sweeping
breakthrough planned for September, and the grapple for ever more desolate yards of mud went on as winter drew near. Now his battalion was sent in to the upland behind Thiepval, a mile or more from the old British front line: a wilderness that, though relatively unscarred by shellfire, was arduous to negotiate and remote from established supply lines. The signallers synchronized the battalion's watches, and the Fusiliers were off, marching up the hill to Ovillers, past what had once been its church, and slogging onward into a maze of narrow trenches. Tolkien settled in on 6 October at battalion headquarters in front of the Ferme de Mouquet, unaffectionately known as Mucky Farm, a warren of fortified cellars that had finally been taken a week ago. (Its roofs could be seen sparkling from Blighty Wood when G. B. Smith and the Salford Pals had prepared to attack on 1 July; they had been given a map of the farm on the supposition that they would arrive there with their picks and shovels an hour and forty minutes after leaving the wood.)

The Fusiliers moved into a sequence of three trenches, with Huxtable and ‘A' Company in the frontline Hessian Trench. Opposite lay the long Regina Trench, held by German Marines. To the right, and eastward, Regina Trench was under attack by Canadian troops. To the left, the endless rattle of gunfire and the
crump
of explosions marked the ongoing struggle for the Schwaben Redoubt. Ration parties leading mules repeatedly came under shellfire on the exposed brow of the land, where the trenches were barely worth the name. Ten men on a working party were killed this way returning from the front line, and the officer in charge succumbed to wounds the next day.

Now, less than a month after it began, Huxtable's stay on the Somme came to a sudden close. A shell burst on the parados or rear wall of his trench on 10 October, bringing it down on top of him. He was freed, but splinters of shrapnel had shot through his leg and one shard remained embedded in the bone of his calf. Huxtable was packed off to the casualty clearing station and thence to England. He had gained what many soldiers craved, a Blighty wound; but Tolkien had lost a deputy and a companionable friend.

The same day ‘A' Company and the others were pulled back to the reserve trenches between Mouquet Farm and the front line and set to work digging, as ever, to deepen, widen, and strengthen the trenches. They vacated Hessian Trench in the nick of time, for on Thursday 12 October the Germans counterattacked all along the line. The next day Tolkien and battalion headquarters moved forward to the Zollern Redoubt, five hundred yards to the rear of Hessian Trench. They were greeted that evening and through the night by tear gas shells, but on Saturday there was encouraging news: the Schwaben Redoubt had fallen. Two days later instructions came down from the generals that they now wanted Regina Trench.

The weather had held out well, apart from a single day's downpour, but a white frost ushered in Monday 16 October. There was not much time before winter locked the infantry down. Possession of Regina Trench would afford the British a panoramic view across German-held roads, fields, and towns to the north. Prisoners had been interrogated, planes had flown reconnaissance missions. For the first time, Tolkien had been issued with a fresh set of coded
unit designations
to confuse German intelligence. On Tuesday the Fusiliers, now numbering less than four hundred, descended from the plateau to rehearse for the attack in a safe area at Ovillers Post, just behind the old British front line west of Ovillers village. The four-mile trudge up the trenches to the front line began after dark on Wednesday 18 October 1916.

It was G. B. Smith's twenty-second birthday. He had outlived his worst apprehensions, but a darkening of mood was apparent in his letters. After the August reunion he had spoken of the pleasure of re-reading the
Mabinogion
and warned Tolkien that his title of ‘Raconteur of the TCBS' was under threat from Christopher Wiseman (who had sent tales of ‘his discovery of Brazilian Beetle Bangles in the wilds of Cumberland'). But soon Smith was mourning his own lost capacity for lunacy; he felt burdened with regrets and responsibilities. ‘Perhaps this note of
regret would be drowned did I feel that I was now doing things that are in any way worth doing,' he wrote. ‘Yes, I think it is sheer vacancy which is destroying me.' His letters dwindled to little more than notes pleading for some word from his friend, or craving escape. ‘
Thoughts of leave
are already beginning to play about my leaden brows. Roll on! as they say in Lancashire. Twice I have dreamed of it: surely after the third time it will come to pass.' For Tolkien, too, leave was always tantalizingly just around the corner, but his ordeal was now more acute than Smith's. If August had been ‘universal weariness', October must have been near exhaustion. ‘
There were times
when the constant deprivation of sleep drove men almost out of their mind,' recalled Charles Douie. With mud and slush everywhere and winds blowing ever chillier, others were ‘
astonished that flesh
and blood can stand this sort of thing'.

Zero hour for the attack by Tolkien's battalion on the German-held Regina Trench was set for just after midday on Thursday, 19 October 1916; but, having at last deposited themselves in Hessian Trench with their load of bombs and sandbags at four o'clock in the morning, the Fusiliers had to turn around and go back to Ovillers Post. Heavy rain on Wednesday, and torrents still falling through Thursday morning, had made a morass of the upland. No Man's Land would be an impassable slough. Telegraph lines had gone down and the foul weather precluded visual signals. The assault was postponed for forty-eight hours. Three patrols, however, ventured out to check that the enemy's wire had been cut. This time it had: so effectively that one patrol passed through unawares and another actually climbed into Regina Trench before fleeing under a hail of bombs.

On Saturday morning, 21 October, Tolkien was ensconced once more with his equipment and runners in a dugout where Hessian Trench came closest to the enemy line, which lay a furlong downhill, out of sight beyond a bulge of ground. The rain clouds had blown away under a strong, icy wind. The mercury had fallen to its lowest since the Big Push began, and
a sharp frost had paralysed that other enemy, the mud. Tolkien and the others in headquarters were given a hot meal, as were the men squatting and standing along three miles of frozen trench: the Fusiliers, the three battalions to their right, and the five to their left. All was as quiet as the front line could ever be, though way off to the west fighting could be heard around the Schwaben Redoubt.

Six minutes after midday the heavy guns and howitzers launched the cannonade. The first two companies of Fusiliers climbed out into the noise and smoke, followed quickly by the second wave: ‘A' Company with their picks and shovels strapped to their backs, flanked by the battalion bombers. Tolkien's signallers went last, with the third wave, accompanied by men hauling machine guns and heavy trench mortars. Abruptly, the crowded, narrow trench was almost empty, and the Fusiliers were vanishing over the whale's back of No Man's Land towards the curtain of shells falling before Regina Trench. Evers, the padre, followed with the stretcher bearers. After a minute and a half the artillery barrage crept further away to fall directly on Regina Trench opposite Tolkien's headquarters.

Another two and a half minutes, and explosions abruptly shook Hessian itself: the big German guns had woken up. By now the trench was filled with men of the Royal Irish Rifles, who had moved forward from their support position. Flares went up on the far side of No Man's Land, but not the red flares the Fusiliers had taken to signal their positions. The minutes ticked by. Over to the left an enemy machine gun chattered.

Then figures came tumbling in over the parapet. They wore enemy field grey, but they were desperate, defeated men. At 12.20 p.m., Tolkien told brigade headquarters that Hessian Trench had begun to receive its first German prisoners.

The demoralized men of the 73rd and 74th Landwehr had been taken by surprise when the Fusiliers reached Regina Trench. Many had not got up from the ‘funk-holes' gouged into the chalky walls in which they slept, and they had been caught still wrapped in groundsheets against the piercing cold. The distress
flares had gone up, but most of the Germans had surrendered and were sent back across No Man's Land, through their own retaliatory bombardment. Now the Royal Irish were marching the prisoners at gunpoint out of Hessian Trench, towards the divisional cage.

Directly opposite battalion headquarters a tiny group of defenders held out for a while but then joined the mass surrender. Over to the right, bursts of rifle fire and grenade explosions indicated a more stubborn pocket of resistance. Signallers flashed across a request for more grenades to be sent over and the Royal Irish started carrying them across. Finally, the fifteen or so ragged survivors of this last German stand were also back in Hessian Trench. The other half had been killed by the Fusiliers: bombed or bayoneted, or machine-gunned from their own parapet.

News filtered back from the battle fitfully. One of Tolkien's runners who brought messages through the German bombardment was later decorated for bravery. The signaller hauling the battalion's pigeon basket across No Man's Land was hit, though another man rescued the basket and released a pigeon from Regina Trench with news of victory for divisional headquarters. The Fusiliers set up their red flags there and at 1.12 p.m. Tolkien sent a message to brigade headquarters that they had won the objective and joined up with the Loyal North Lancashires to their left. At 1.55 p.m. he reported that they had linked up with the unit to their right, too. Through the afternoon the other battalions won through, and Tolkien's division alone took more than seven hundred prisoners. Regina Trench was littered with the bodies of those who had not surrendered.

In No Man's Land lay fallen Fusiliers, most of them hit by their own artillery as they tried to keep close to the ‘creeping barrage'; Captain Metcalfe and the other company leader in the first wave had both been wounded before reaching the enemy line. Forty-one Lancashire Fusiliers were dead or missing. Evers, the padre, tended to many of the 117 wounded. ‘Some had the will to live and others hadn't,' he said. ‘I remember going up to one with whom I could find nothing very serious and telling
him that I would return shortly with a stretcher party, to find when I had done so that he had passed out. Others that really were badly knocked about retained their courage and were carried back to safety.' Evers finally walked back into Hessian Trench the next day, covered in blood and astonished to be greeted by a cheering battalion. He had been out all the bitterly cold night under shellfire. Later he wrote, ‘There is a war picture depicting a shadowy Christ alongside an RAMC officer helping in a wounded man – well, I saw no such vision, but I was nonetheless conscious of His presence during those hours.'

The Fusiliers were relieved on Sunday, slowly and fearfully, as darkness fell and shells crumped around them. The officers from battalion headquarters rode out on horseback. On the way down to Ovillers Post they encountered several of the fabled tanks, crawling noisily up to the line. ‘The horses were thoroughly frightened,' said a wounded officer riding with them. ‘Neither horses nor riders had ever seen, or heard, any tanks before.'

For Second Lieutenant Tolkien, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 25th Division, the Battle of the Somme was over; but comfort, ease, and safety seemed far away. They were being switched from the Fifth Army, which had commanded them on the Somme, to the Second Army, long associated with Ypres, a name of ill omen. Monday 23 October 1916 dawned misty and damp outside Tolkien's tent in the camp between Albert and Bouzincourt: wet weather just in time for a series of parades. The 74th Brigade was inspected by its brigadier-general at Albert, then taken by bus ten miles west for inspection by the divisional major-general. At least there was a hut to sleep in that night. On Tuesday came a final route march, thirteen miles along liquid roads from Vadencourt to Beauval, where Tolkien had attended Mass on the way to Franqueville back in September. Since leaving Étaples in June, he had packed his kit and moved forty-five times. Now, for the first time in nearly a month, he
slept not under canvas or in a hut or a hole, but under a proper roof, in Beauval's Rue d'Épinelte.

On Wednesday 25 October Tolkien felt weak and unwell, but he did not report sick until after the Fusiliers had been inspected and thanked by General Gough of the Fifth Army and by Field-Marshal Haig, the British commander-in-chief. On Friday, a cold and showery day, he went to the medical officer with a temperature of 103.

He had trench fever, a gift of the inescapable lice that had bred in the seams of his clothes and fed on him, passing a bacterium,
Rickettsia quintana,
into his bloodstream. That could have happened anything from two weeks to a month ago. British soldiers typically blamed lice on the German trenches they had to occupy, perhaps with more justice than prejudice: soldiers close to defeat, after all, are likely to prove less fastidious than the incoming victors. Evers recounts a scene from the Somme that may feature Tolkien, unnamed, in the role of the signals officer: ‘
On one occasion
I spent the night with the Brigade Machine Gun Officer and the Signals Officer in one of the captured German dug-outs…We dossed down for the night in the hopes of getting some sleep, but it was not to be. We no sooner lay down than hordes of lice got up. So we went round to the Medical Officer, who was also in the dug-out with his equipment, and he gave us some ointment which he assured us would keep the little brutes away. We anointed ourselves all over with the stuff and again lay down in great hopes, but it was not to be, because instead of discouraging them it seemed to act like a kind of
hors d'oeuvre
and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour.'