Tolkien and the Great War

by John Garth

  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.

  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, whe
re 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 caug
ht 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.’