Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  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:

  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.

  TEN

  In a hole in the ground

  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…n
o 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.