Very soon Lewis discovered the river, going boating on most afternoons, bathing at Parson’s Pleasure ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’,5 and generally revelling in the usual delights of a first Summer Term. Soon, too, he discovered the bookshops – of which there were many more than there are now, and all still independent. In his letter of 6 May he told Arthur he had made the acquaintance of the College library, and ‘still better is the Library of the Union Society (a club everyone belongs to)’.6 ‘It has a writing room of strictest silence,’ he wrote to Arthur on 13 May, ‘and an admirable library where I have passed many happy hours and hope to pass many more.’7
The happy time at Univ. came to an end on 7 June when Lewis joined a cadet battalion. He was, however, fortunate in that the battalion was quartered in Keble College, so that he was to remain in Oxford for another three months. Writing to his father on 10 June, he said,
at first when I left my own snug quarters and my own friends at Univ. for a carpetless little cell with two beds (minus sheets or pillows) at Keble, and got into a Tommy’s uniform, I will not deny that I thought myself very ill used … My chief friend is Somerville, scholar of Eton and scholar of King’s, Cambridge, a very quiet sort of person, but very booky and interesting. Moore of Clifton, my room companion, and Sutton of Repton (the company humorist) are also very good fellows. The former is a little too childish for real companionship, but I will forgive him much for his appreciation of Newbolt.*
‘Though the work is very hard and not very interesting, I am quite reconciled to my lot. It is doing me a lot of good,’ he confided to Greeves that same day:
I have made a number of excellent friends … My room-mate Moore (of Clifton) is quite a good fellow, tho’ a little too childish and virtuous for ‘common nature’s daily food’. The advantages of being in Oxford are very great as I can get weekend leave (from 1 o’clock Saturday till 11 o’clock p.m. Sunday) and go to Univ. where I enjoy the rare luxury of sheets and a long sleep …
I am in a strangely productive mood at present and spend my few moments of spare time in scribbling verse. When my four months course in the cadet battalion is at an end, I shall, supposing I get a commission all right, have a four weeks leave before joining my regiment. During it I propose to get together all the stuff I have perpetrated and see if any kind publisher would like to take it. After that, if the fates decide to kill me at the front, I shall enjoy a nine days immortality while friends who know nothing about poetry imagine that I must have been a genius – what usually happens in such cases. In the meantime my address is – No. 738 Cadet C.S. Lewis, ‘E’ Company, Keble College, Oxford.8
While he continued to see Martin Somerville and his other friends, a close bond developed quickly between Lewis and his room-mate, Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore. Paddy was exactly Lewis’s age, and his sister Maureen was eleven. Their mother, Mrs Janie Askins Moore, was born in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, on 28 March 1872, the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman. In 1897 she married Edward Francis Courtney Moore. They lived in Dublin, where Mr Moore was an engineer. Mr and Mrs Moore separated in 1907 and Mrs Moore moved with the children to Bristol to be near one of her brothers. Paddy had been educated there at Clifton College, and when he was sent to Oxford for training with the Officers’ Training Corps, Mrs Moore and Maureen came with him. They took rooms in Wellington Square, a short distance from Keble College, and almost at once Lewis was a favoured guest. He, in turn, was able to show Paddy and his family the hospitality of Univ., and Lewis clearly liked their company.
The Dean of Univ. soon made Lewis’s double life impossible, and he was forced to give up his room. ‘This week end, as you gather, I am again spending in Univ.,’ he wrote to Greeves on 8 July. ‘Do you know, Ami, I am more homesick for this College than ever I was for Little Lea. I love every stone in it.’9
After a brief leave in Belfast (9–11 August) Jack wrote to his father on 27 August 1917:
You must have been wondering what had come over me, but I hope that the crowded time I have been having since I left home will serve as some excuse. First of all came the week at Warwick, which was a nightmare … We came back on Saturday, and the following weekend I spent with Moore at the digs of his mother who, as I mentioned, is staying at Oxford. I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself. On Wednesday as you know, Warnie was up here and we had a most enjoyable afternoon and evening together, chiefly at my rooms in Univ. How I wish you could have been there too. But please God I shall be able to see you at Oxford and show you my ‘sacred city’ in happier times.10
‘The next amusement on our programme’, he wrote again on 10 September, ‘is a three-day bivouac up in the Wytham hills. As it has rained all the time for two or three days, our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud. You know how I always disapproved of realism in art!’11
This was followed by an exam on 25 September 1917, which seems to have been little more than a formality. The next day Jack was given a temporary commission in the Army and a month’s leave. Albert Lewis waited in vain for Jack to come home, and he was saddened and puzzled to learn that Jack had gone to Bristol to visit Paddy Moore and his family. ‘I suppose you must have been wondering what had become of your prodigal son,’ Jack wrote to his father on 3 October. ‘We got away from Keble on Saturday, and instead of staying in Oxford with the Moores I came down here to their home in Bristol … On Monday a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford, went on so terribly that Mrs Moore took my temperature and put me to bed, where I am writing this letter.’12
This stay in Bristol was to have far-reaching consequences. Lewis and Paddy, and indeed Mrs Moore too, would have known that the slaughter of young officers at this period in the war was very great and that their chances of surviving the war were slim. However, despite Paddy’s conviction that he would come back, Maureen was to recall hearing her brother and Jack promise one another that if only one survived the war the survivor would look after Paddy’s mother and Jack’s father. Mrs Moore was to mention the promise to Albert Lewis after the war. While Jack was still with the Moores in Bristol Paddy learned that he had been placed in the Rifle Brigade, and he crossed to France ahead of Lewis.
In the end Jack didn’t reach Belfast until Friday, 12 October, and he was with his father for only a few days. On the 16th he was gazetted into the Somerset Light Infantry, and on Thursday, 18 October he left home to join his regiment at Crownhill, South Devon.
While at home Jack had talked with Arthur Greeves, and the first suggestion that Lewis’s feelings for Mrs Moore approached infatuation comes in the letter he wrote Arthur from his army base at Crownhill on 28 October.
Since coming back and meeting a certain person, I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try and forget my various statements and not to refer to the subject … And now to tell you all the news. I am quite fairly comfortable here, we are in huts: but I have a room to myself with a fire in it and so am quite snug.13
But suddenly the dreaded summons to the front reached him. At 5.55 p.m. on 15 November 1917 Jack wired desperately to his father: ‘Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. Jack.’14
‘No one in Great Britain getting Jack’s wire would have had a moment’s doubt that he was on the eve of embarkation for overseas service,’15 wrote Warnie. But Albert Lewis simply wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’16 Even more desperately Jack wired back at 11.20 the following morning: ‘Orders France. Reporting Southampton 4 p.m. Saturday. If coming wire immediately.’17
Albert Lewis did not come, and Jack crossed to France on 17 November 1917. ‘This is really a very sudden and unpleasant surprise,’ he wrote to his father from Fra
nce on 21 November. ‘I had no notion of it until I was sent off on my forty-eight hours final leave, in fact I thought they were ragging me when they told me. I am now at a certain very safe base town where we live comfortably in huts as we did at Crownhill.’18
Lewis arrived at the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November. To his great surprise he found that the captain of his company, P.G.K. Harris, was none other than ‘Pogo’ who taught him at Cherbourg School. Years before, Lewis said, the flashy Pogo had instilled in him the desire for ‘glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know’.19 The years since Cherbourg and the war had changed both pupil and master. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy, ‘As I emerged from the shaft into the dug-out and blinked in the candle-light I noticed that the Captain to whom I was reporting was a master whom I had liked more than I had respected at one of my schools. I ventured to claim acquaintance. He admitted in a low, hurried voice that he had once been a schoolmaster, and the topic was never raised between us again.’20 Lewis may never have known of Harris’s heroism. For his bravery at Verchain in October 1918 Captain Harris was awarded the Military Cross; his gallantry at Preseau on 1 November 1918 won him a glowing place in military histories.21
Meanwhile, Albert Lewis was very worried about his son and, believing that he would be safer in the artillery than in the infantry, he contacted Colonel James Craig, MP for the East Division of Co. Down, asking if he could get Jack transferred. ‘I am at present in billets in a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,’ Jack wrote to his father on 13 December.22 As Mr Lewis laboured to have his son transferred, Jack fell ill at the beginning of February 1918 with what the troops called ‘trench fever’ and the doctors PUO (pyrexia, unknown origin). He was sent for a pleasant three weeks at No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport.
He remained in hospital for the rest of the month, with one slight relapse early on, writing more and more nostalgic letters to Arthur Greeves about their quiet days together in Belfast and his own brief stay in Oxford. Arthur was worried that, because of Lewis’s love for Mrs Moore, their friendship was imperilled. ‘I must admit,’ Jack wrote to him on 2 February 1918, ‘fate has played strange with me since last winter: I feel I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it … As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills … Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life.’23
He returned to the front on 28 February, but was out of the immediate fighting area when the Germans launched their great spring offensive on 21 March utilizing all the additional troops withdrawn from the Eastern Front after the collapse of revolution-ridden Russia.
This, perhaps the worst crisis of the war, galvanized the War Cabinet into action at last. Lloyd George took over the direction of the War Office on 23 March and was soon transporting 30,000 men a day to France. General Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France, had said that he could only hold the Germans for eighteen days without the reserve: Lloyd George got them over to him within a week. Nevertheless, the Allies were not merely retreating, they were disintegrating. On 3 April Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch took over supreme command of the Allied Armies (his position was made official on 14 April) and was slowly able to halt the advance when the Germans were within forty miles of Paris. ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end,’ cried General Haig,24 speaking for the British forces of which he was still in supreme command when the second German putsch came (9–25 April) – and the line of defence stretched without breaking. General Ludendorff, the German chief of staff, drew back slowly and sullenly towards ultimate defeat.
During the First Battle of Arras, from 21 to 28 March 1918, Lewis was in or near the front line. ‘Until the great German attack came in the spring we had a pretty quiet time,’ he recorded in Surprised by Joy.
Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely ‘keeping us quiet’ by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day … Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire … I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war – the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet – all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.25
Still in the area around Arras, Lewis next saw action in the Battle of Hazebrouck, from 12 to 15 April. The particular phase of that great battle in which he took part centred on Riez du Vinage. Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between 14 and 16 April:
The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols ascertained that the enemy was holding Riez du Vinage, a small wooded village north of the canon and north-east of Mt Bernenchon … As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on 14 April], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Cacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad!’ and were made prisoners.
When dawn broke on the 15th a considerable number of Germans in full marching order were seen: they were advancing in twos and threes into shell holes from houses north and north-east of Riez and from the northern end of Bois de Pacaut. Heavy rifle fire and Lewis-gun fire was opened on them, serious casualties being inflicted, and if a serious counter-attack was intended it was definitely broken up, for no further action was taken by the evening: his stretcher bearers were busy for the rest of the day.
About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men … a little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets … About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down …
The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.26
Lewis was wounded by an English shell exploding behind him. (‘Hence the greeting of an aunt,’ wrote Lewis, ‘who said, with obvious relief, “Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!”’)27 He was able to write a few lines to his father on 17 April, to say that he was in the ‘Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital, Etaples – Getting on all right but can’t write properly yet as my left arm is still tied up and it’s hard to manage with one.’28 And on 14 May: ‘I expect to be sent across in a few days time, o
f course as a stretcher case … In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my “pigeon chest” … this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.’29
When the Army medical records were released many years later, the Proceedings of the Medical Board assembled by order of the GOC London District described Lewis’s wounds thus:
The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated – there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.*
On 25 May 1918 Lewis arrived by stretcher at Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London. His first act was to send his father a telegram. Lewis was out of the war, though he did not yet know it. ‘I am sitting up in bed in the middle of a red sunset to answer this evening’s letter straightaway,’ he wrote to Arthur on 29 May. ‘I am in a vastly comfortable hospital, where we are in separate rooms and have tea in the morning and big broad beds and every thing the heart of man could desire; and best of all, in close communication with all the bookshops of London.’30
C. S. Lewis Page 7
