Tolkien and the Great War (24 page)

The medical corps of 1916, for all their heroic work, were not much more use against trench fever itself, which they labelled ‘pyrexia of unknown origin'. The symptoms – a sudden loss of strength and balance, often accompanied by a rash, headaches, and severe pain in the legs and back – were left to run their course through rest. In some few cases the persistent fever might lead to heart failure; but for Tolkien,
Rickettsia quintana
proved a life-saver.

The army was notoriously suspicious about any attempt to ‘cry off sick', but there was no question about Tolkien's condition. He left the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers exactly four months after he joined them, on Saturday 28 October 1916, and was transferred to an officers' hospital a short distance from Beauval, at Gézaincourt. On Sunday he was taken on the ambulance train from Candas to Le Touquet, and a bed at the Duchess of Westmorland Hospital. That night the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers also left Candas by rail, Flanders-bound. Since his arrival the battalion had lost nearly six hundred men: four hundred and fifty of them wounded, sixty dead, and seventy-four missing. Only the drafts it had received during the same period had enabled the unit to continue. But Tolkien had survived whole in body, and for the time being he was safe.

The fever persisted. Tolkien wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, his commanding officer, explaining his whereabouts, but All Hallows went by and after nine days in hospital at Le Touquet he was sent by train to Le Havre. There, on 8 November 1916, he boarded the soldier's joy, ‘the Blighty boat'. A packet ship in peacetime, the steam liner
Asturias
was now brilliantly lit up and painted white, with green stripes and red crosses, to tell enemy submarines that she was a hospital ship and not a military target. She was large and comfortable, with cosy beds; and during the ten-hour crossing the next day there were sea-water baths to be had. Most homeward-bound soldiers were walking wounded, happy to have a minor but honourable ‘Blighty' wound. The worst-hit survivors of battle never got further than the tented ‘moribund ward' of the casualty clearing station in the field. Some, especially now that winter was here, were simply ill, like Tolkien; but others suffered from something worse than feverish delirium: they trembled or twitched uncontrollably and had an otherworldly look.

England glimmered into view: the Lonely Isle, ‘
sea-girdled
and alone'.
The
Asturias
steamed into Southampton and the same day a train took Tolkien back to the city of his childhood. That night, Thursday 9 November, he was in a bed at the Birmingham University Hospital. Soon he was reunited with Edith, five months after the parting that had seemed ‘
like a death
'.

The
First Southern General Hospital
(as it was officially known) had been set up in September 1914 in the grand arched
halls and corridors of the university at Edgbaston and was continually being expanded under pressure of war casualties, who were cared for by the Medical Corps with the assistance of Red Cross and St John Ambulance volunteers. Tolkien was not the only old TCBSite invalided home to Birmingham, for
T. K. Barnsley
was back too. Buried alive by a trench mortar at Beaumont-Hamel in August, Tea-Cake had been packed off to England with a split eardrum and suffering from shell shock. Rob Gilson's sister, Molly, dressed wounds here for the army surgeon, Major Leonard Gamgee. A man of some repute, and an Old Edwardian, he was a relative of the famous Sampson Gamgee who had invented, and given his name to, surgical
gamgee-tissue,
mentioned by Tolkien as the source of Sam Gamgee's surname in
The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien would not be here for long, if his commanding officer had his way. Captain Munday, the 11th Lancashire Fusilier's new adjutant (Kempson having been shot through the shoulder in the attack on Regina Trench) sent a note for Tolkien to hand to the military authorities as soon as he was discharged from hospital. The battalion was short of officers, his signallers were under a non-commissioned officer, and he was needed badly, it said, adding: ‘
Lt-Col Bird wishes me
to state that he values the services of Lt Tolkien very highly.' The CO was going to be very disappointed; but not so Tolkien's friends. ‘Stay a long time in England,' exhorted G. B. Smith when he heard. ‘Do you know I was horribly afraid you had been settled for good? I am beyond measure delighted…' If Wiseman shared those fears he did not voice them, but he was equally merry when Smith passed on the news. ‘If you had offered me 500 guesses,' he declared, ‘I would never had thought of your being in giddy old Brum, as you once called it. I wish I could get off for one day only, and would go straight there and see you.' Tolkien, he noted, had sent him no poetry since their argument about its ‘freakishness' back in March. Tolkien duly despatched some of his verses and, thanks perhaps to Wiseman's prompting, during November he revised the long semi-autobiographical poem he had written in the midst of that argument, ‘The Wanderer's Allegiance',
renaming the sequence
‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow'
.

On Saturday 2 December 1916 Tolkien was called before a military
medical board
. His temperature had been back to normal for a week, but he was still pale and weak and beset by persistent aches and pains in his legs. The board predicted that he would be fit for action in six weeks. In fact Tolkien was considering a transfer to the Royal Engineers, which ought to be safer than a combat unit. The idea perhaps had something to do with his father's sister Mabel and her husband Tom Mitton, whose home in Moseley Tolkien was using as a correspondence address and whose son, Thomas Ewart Mitton, was a signaller in the Royal Engineers. Christopher Wiseman had suggested that Tolkien appeal to Tea-Cake's father, Sir John Barnsley, to let him into his brigade. Nothing came of the idea; but in the meantime he was unfit for service, and the board told him to go home.

In his absence Edith had traced his movements on the map on her wall. Until now, any knock at her door could have brought a dreaded War Office telegram. His return to Great Haywood was thus an emotionally charged moment, which Tolkien marked with a six-stanza ballad, ‘The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel'.
Tavrobel
(‘wood-home') is the Gnomish equivalent of Haywood (‘enclosed wood'), but on this occasion any mythological considerations seem secondary to the personal ones.
^*
The scene is set with ‘two rivers running fleetly' – the Trent and the Sow – and a reference to the old packhorse bridge that spans them at Great Haywood. Further parallels with Tolkien's situation do not need spelling out as the ballad moves into a dialogue of love and longing:

‘O! tell me, little damozelle,

Why smile you in the gloaming

On the old grey bridge of Tavrobel

As the grey folk come a-homing?'

‘I smile because you come to me

O'er the grey bridge in the gloaming:

I have waited, waited, wearily

To see you come a-homing.

In Tavrobel things go but ill,

And my little garden withers

In Tavrobel beneath the hill,

While you're beyond the rivers.'

‘Ay, long and long I have been away

O'er sea and land and river

Dreaming always of the day

Of my returning hither.'

With a final stanza that laments lost ‘days of sunlight', ‘The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel' is slight yet haunting. By contrast, Tolkien's last batch of poems was unreservedly declared ‘magnificent' by Christopher Wiseman, who promised that if Tolkien were to publish he could arrange for a decent notice in the
Manchester Guardian.
‘I am convinced,' he declared from the
Superb,
‘that if you do come out in print you will startle our generation as no one has as yet…Really it is presumptuous in me to say anything about the poems themselves, but I am afraid they will kill the dear old XIXth Century altogether…Where you are going to lead us is a mystery…' Wiseman now felt that G. B. Smith was lagging behind and was still fundamentally a Victorian writer. Surely, he added, the TCBS was ‘one of the most extraordinary associations ever', what with its two antithetical poets and himself, more likely to become a finance minister.

Wiseman was concerned about Smith, and not just about his current poetic output, which he felt was
‘rather below his usual standard'
. He had asked Tolkien to write ‘and tell me all about him'; but Tolkien had not seen Smith since August, and letters had become more and more brief. With the conversion of the 3rd Salford Pals to a ‘pioneer' battalion of navvies, they had taken part in one attack but largely just laid roads and dug trenches. Such a unit had no use for intelligence work, so Smith had shouldered the dull duties of billeting officer. Every time the battalion moved he would go on ahead to arrange accommodation and then meet the troops as they marched up behind. Small wonder that he had complained ‘sheer vacancy' was destroying him. At the end of October 1916, as Tolkien lay in hospital in Le Touquet, Smith had become adjutant, responsible for all the manpower requirements of the Pals. He announced the fact with a humorist's false modesty (‘For such I am, eheu, eheu'), but in practice being adjutant was unexciting, and in a pioneer battalion it meant little more than churning out routine marching orders. ‘Fur undercoats will be neatly rolled and strapped on top of packs,' he would write. ‘Strict march discipline must be observed and on no account must men be allowed to straggle…Battalion Order No. 252 para 3, re carrying of loose articles or parcels on the line of march, will also be strictly complied with.'

All this was contrary to Smith's guiding spirit. By nature he was undisciplined and passionately skittish. He had once written despairingly: ‘
My career in the Army
has not been a success, because I
cannot
set myself or realise the Army ideals in business matters. What is
clean?
What is
just?
What is
severe?
I know not, nor ever shall, although I have tried very hard, from a sense of duty.' Now he joked bitterly, ‘The Corps Commander is in the yard…and your humble servant sits in his Adjutant's rabbit hole and simply shivers. I am so much afraid he will rush in and ask me why I haven't complied with his XYX/S7/U
⁵
/3F of yesterday's date or something.' The schoolboy who had found the ‘engaging rascal' Robin Hood ‘one of the most living characters in all literature', and the ‘wild and whole-hearted
admirer' of Tolkien's mythology, were imprisoned behind an army desk.

Smith's training in the language of military orders and reports had enabled him to describe with detachment in his official intelligence report for 1 July the slaughter of the men with whom he had lived and worked for eighteen months: ‘Owing to hostile MG fire the advance was made by short rushes. Casualties were heavy.' So far as poetry communicates feeling, this was the reverse of poetry. The sheer horror of war, of course, also conspired to de-sensitize, as Smith knew when he wrote, of his generation,

Who battled have with bloody hands

Through evil times in barren lands,

To whom the voice of guns

Speaks and no longer stuns…

All this, combined with the sheer grind of winter life on the Somme, amply explains any decline in Smith's writing. But war seemed endless; and if he felt sorry for himself, it is hard not to join him in sympathy. In one of his late pieces he addressed the spirits of Rob Gilson and other dead friends:

Shapes in the mist, ye see me lonely,

Lonely and sad in the dim firelight:

How far now to the last of all battles?

(Listen, the guns are loud tonight!)

At least the Salford Pals, stationed for the past two months just behind the front line, had lost no men in all that time. He had entertained his widowed mother with letters about his
riding experiences
, and the news of his friend's safe return home seemed to have cheered Smith immensely. Unfortunately, his promotion to adjutant had delayed his next opportunity to get away, but on 16 November he wrote to Tolkien: ‘
I hope I shall be able
to come to Great Haywood, for my leave is assuredly on the wing.'

When the Battle of the Somme finally petered out in late November 1916, G. B. Smith was stationed with the Salford Pals at the non-descript village of Souastre, nine miles north of Bouzincourt where he had last seen Tolkien. The pioneers spent the short, freezing days in bursts of rain, sleet, and snow. On the morning of Wednesday 29 November, Smith was overseeing the usual repairing and drainage work on one of the roads leading out of the village, but he had organized a football match for the men that afternoon and was looking forward to playing. He was walking along the road when the air was split by the shriek of shells. A German howitzer had fired somewhere to the east, four miles or more away. Two fragments from a bursting shell struck Smith in the right arm and buttock.

He walked to the dressing station and, while waiting for an ambulance, he smoked a cigarette and wrote a letter to his mother telling her not to worry: his wounds were slight and soon he would be back at the base, Étaples. At the casualty clearing station he was in the care of nurses whom he knew and liked.

After two days, however, he developed gas gangrene. Bacteria from the soil had infected his thigh wound, killing off his tissues and swelling them with gas. Surgeons operated to stem the advance. ‘After that he quickly sank,' his mother Ruth told Tolkien. ‘He dictated a letter to me saying I am doing famously and shall be in England soon after Christmas. He thought so, never realising the danger he was in…'

Geoffrey Bache Smith died at half past three in the morning on 3 December 1916, at Warlincourt. His commanding officer told Mrs Smith that those who had survived the terrible first days of the Somme thought they might live to see the end of the war.

Smith wrote his most fully achieved poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles' (begun before the war and rewritten in the trenches after being lost
en route
to France) as a riposte to the axiom that those whom the gods love die young. In it he had envisaged the perfection of a completed life:

O seven times happy he is that dies

After the splendid harvest-tide,

When strong barns shield from winter skies

The grain that's rightly stored inside:

There death shall scatter no more tears

Than o'er the falling of the years.

Aye, happy seven times is he

Who enters not the silent doors

Before his time, but tenderly

Death beckons unto him, because

There's rest within for weary feet

Now all the journey is complete.

Christopher Wiseman broke the news to Tolkien. ‘
My dear JR
,' he wrote. ‘I have just received news from home about GBS, who has succumbed to injuries received from shells bursting on Dec. 3rd. I can't say very much about it now. I humbly pray Almighty God I may be accounted worthy of him. Chris.' In reply to a letter of condolence, Ruth Smith asked Tolkien to send copies of any poems of Geoffrey's he might have, so they could be published. ‘You can imagine what is this loss to me,' she said. After the death of her husband, Geoffrey had become her chief support and strength, and he had relied equally on her. ‘He had never left home until going to Oxford and we built many castles in the air of the life we would have together after the War.'