World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Instead, on October 27, 1916, Tolkien succumbed to trench fever, a serious disease that caused extreme, flu-like symptoms. He was admitted to a field hospital in France, but his condition did not improve, so in November he was shipped back to a hospital in Birmingham, where Edith arrived for a joyful reunion. Although thin and still very weak, he was discharged from hospital in time to spend Christmas with her. During his convalescent leave he began writing a story called “The Fall of Gondolin,” which Edith copied out for him. Before he could finish it, however, in April 1917 he was passed fit to return to the Front, then fell ill again before he could be shipped out and was forced to return to the hospital. For the remainder of the war, he alternated between spells in the hospital and spells on garrison duty, but was never deemed healthy enough to go back to France. He was extremely fortunate because the 11th Battalion had been almost completely wiped out by the war’s end. Chances are he would not have survived.

  DISEASE IN THE TRENCHES

  Trenches were overrun by rats and all kinds of insect life, so disease and infection were rife. The men were prone to cholera from contaminated food or water and dysentery from bacteria or parasites. Many chose to shave their heads to avoid the incessant, infuriating itching caused by nits. Trench foot, a fungal infection caused by prolonged standing around in cold, wet conditions, made the feet swell up and lose sensation. In severe cases it could cause gangrene, and amputation of the toes was sometimes necessary. Doctors were initially puzzled by the disease they called “trench fever,” whose symptoms included headaches, high fever, skin rashes, inflamed eyes, and acute pains in the legs. Most cases cleared up after a few weeks of bed rest, but some (like Tolkien’s) were more severe and kept recurring. It was only in 1918 that medics realized the disease was being spread by the bites of lice, which laid their eggs in the seams of clothing and were extremely hard to eradicate.

  On first arriving in the trenches, men were horrified by the stench: a mixture of overflowing toilets, rotting bodies left in no-man’s-land, ingrained sweat from days without washing, and old rank food smells combined with the creosote and chloride of lime used as disinfectants.

  In November 1917, after a difficult and at times life-threatening labor, Edith gave birth to their first child, a son they called John. Tolkien couldn’t get leave to be there for the birth, but he came to the christening some weeks later, conducted by Father Francis, his old guardian. One day Tolkien and Edith went walking in some woods and Edith did a little dance for him in a clearing. He later recalled: “Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing—and dance.” This episode became the inspiration for a character called Lúthien, an immortal elf-maid who would be at the center of his novel The Silmarillion, and Arwen, a half-elven creature in The Lord of the Rings. Years later he wrote to his son explaining the deep personal significance of that day: “For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.”

  Although Tolkien had spent only four months in France, it was long enough to feel the shadow of the war’s “oppression,” and he later wrote that he was glad to have seen that place where men of all backgrounds and types were thrown together. But by 1918, all but one of his closest friends from university had been killed.

  Tolkien in the 1940s, while he was an Oxford University professor. He was trained to work as a code breaker during the Second World War, but was never called upon.

  According to Tolkien, the Dead Marshes he describes in Lord of the Rings “owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”

  After the War

  Tolkien and Edith’s marital life did not begin properly until after the war, when he got a job as a lexicographer on the New English Dictionary in Oxford and they set up home. Edith wasn’t particularly happy with the social life there, which she found very formal and intimidating. She was happier in 1920 when Tolkien took up a post at the University of Leeds, but by 1925 they were back in Oxford again by which time Tolkien had become preoccupied with his writing. Edith busied herself with playing the piano and caring for their children, of whom there would be four altogether—three boys and a girl. They argued over his preference for the company of his male friends, and over Catholicism, which she increasingly resented. The two began to lead quite separate lives, sleeping in separate rooms, but always remaining solicitous of the other’s comfort.

  “… these difficult times never touched our depths or dimmed the memories of our youthful love.”

  Tolkien wrote long into the night and the results would make him one of the giants of English literature. The Hobbit, published in 1937, was an immediate success. The Lord of the Rings came out in three volumes in 1954 and 1955 and, despite its length and mixed reviews, became one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century. The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977.

  Tolkien began work on The Silmarillion while he was on sick leave during the war; two of his elven characters were inspired by Edith’s singing and dancing.

  After Tolkien retired from university work, he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, to a cottage she loved, and their old teenage closeness returned. They often sat in the evening on the veranda, where he smoked a pipe, she had a cigarette (having taken up smoking in old age), and they talked of their children and grandchildren. They had been through many difficult times—the wounds of childhood bereavement, the arguments and distance that sometimes affected their marriage—but, as Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son, Christopher, “these never touched our depths or dimmed the memories of our youthful love.”

  Lloyd & Mary

  STALEY

  Married: September 15, 1920

  A letter from Lloyd dated February 16, 1919, when he was working for the postal service in Commercy, France.

  A standard-issue US first-aid kit. All US troops carried these tins containing two bandages to apply to the entry and exit wounds made by a bullet.

  Lloyd Maywood Staley

  AMERICAN

  Born: September 10, 1895

  Rank & regiment: Private, Company K, 35th Division US Army; then Sergeant in US postal service

  Mary Beatrice Gray

  AMERICAN

  Born: May 1, 1897

  Mary was both pretty and clever, and many of the boys at school were keen on her.

  Lloyd and Mary had been high-school sweethearts since 1913, but he didn’t ask her to marry him before leaving for France; he thought his chances of returning alive were “rather slim” and didn’t want to enter into a commitment he would not be able to honor.

  M ary’s father, George, was an itinerant preacher for the Plymouth Brethren, an Evangelical movement whose adherents believed in simple Christian observance and worship, and had come from Scotland to the US in 1892 to spread the word. Mary’s mother’s family came from Sweden and had emigrated in the first half of the 19th century. The couple were married in Kansas City in 1896, but moved around frequently during Mary’s childhood as her father sought new converts. They lived in various parts of Nebraska, in Kansas City, and then in Ottawa, Kansas, where Mary started junior high school in the fall of 1911—and where she first met Lloyd.

  Lloyd grew up on a farm south of Wellsville, Kansas, where the year was punctuated by planting and harvesting, the care of livestock, hunting rabbits and squirrels, and swimming on hot days in an old swimming hole. He attended a small country school, and stayed there an extra year beyond eighth grade because his older brother Glen was still away at high school and only one boy could be spared from working on the farm at a time. When Lloyd’s turn came, he moved to Ottawa to live with his grandmother and immediately thrived at Ottawa High School. He became captain of the football team, president of his senior class, and was also accepted into a literature society.

  Lloyd’s grandfather built the farmhouse in Kansas where Lloyd was born.

  Mary must have been disappointed that he did not propo
se marriage to her before leaving.

  Mary was pretty and a lot of the boys were keen on her when she joined the school, but by senior year she and Lloyd had become an item. At the senior class picnic, they loitered behind the rest of the crowd, and Lloyd later told her that these were “golden days,” the happiest of his entire school career. After leaving school they continued to see each other whenever they could, going to concerts and attending church together as well as walking in the countryside, but her family always returned to Nebraska for the summer, so they got into the habit of writing to each other during these periods of separation.

  In 1916, Lloyd enrolled at Ottawa University and he was still a freshman when on April 6, 1917, the United States formally entered the First World War. In a burst of patriotism, he enrolled for the 1st Company Kansas National Guard, a decision which, he wrote later, after seeing the horrors of war first-hand, “I do not now believe was done in the exercise of best judgment.”

  Mary must have been anxious at the news of his enlistment, and disappointed that he did not propose marriage to her before leaving. They had been courting for four years and she was already twenty years old, which was quite an age to still be single in their generation. There was no way of knowing how long he would be away from home or if he would even return. On their last evening together, August 4, 1917, they went out in his Ford motorcar and, according to a letter he wrote from the Front, “the celebration was continued into the early morning of the fifth.” She saw him off at the station and both agreed that they would write to each other regularly. Thus began their long and very loving war correspondence.

  Over to Europe

  During the winter of 1917–18, Lloyd did his Army basic training at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, in a tent heated only by a stove. It was a cold snowy winter, with strong winds, and many a tent caught fire when sparks from the stove struck the canvas. On April 24, 1918, the regiment set sail from New York bound for Liverpool, with Lloyd writing of a rough crossing. But arriving in England, he found it to be“a very pretty country,” though with “a noticeable lack of men.” They caught a train down to the Channel coast, then sailed for France to begin further training under a British commander. Lloyd wrote to Mary that it was hard to believe they were so near the Front as they looked out over “peaceful-looking farming country,” but then the big guns began, their sound echoing from one direction and then another.

  WORLD WAR ONE SLANG

  The use of slang terms at the front line encouraged a feeling of comradeship, and many phrases used then have made their way into the language. Germans were known as “Fritz,” “Jerry,” “Huns,” or (by the French) “Boche;” they were said to find the last of these particularly rude. The French were “Parlewuhs” or “Parleyvoos” (from parlez-vous) or “Tulemongs” (tout le monde). British soldiers were universally known as “Tommies,” a term said to be derived from a soldier who had distinguished himself at the Battle of Waterloo, while Americans were “doughboys,” a word thought to have come from the Mexican–American war when forces were covered in chalky adobe dust. Lots of phrases denigrated superior officers, so the oak leaves on a field officer’s hat became “scrambled eggs,” while those with lightning decorations became “farts and darts,” and any of high rank were known as “brass.” “Blighty” was England (it derived from a Hindi word), so “a Blighty” was a wound serious enough to get you sent home. And no one directly referred to death but spoke of unlucky comrades “going west” or “hopping it.”

  Propaganda posters were designed to aid recruitment and to raise funds to support the war effort. Buying liberty bonds, a type of investment that raised capital for the military, was seen as a patriotic duty in America.

  Mary wrote that her brother Robert had volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps, the British Air Force. Lloyd commiserated with her on losing not one but two loved ones, but he told her he believed there would be two classes of men after the war, “the ones who went, and the ones who did not.”

  Lloyd on leave in southern France during 1919. He enjoyed sightseeing and collecting battlefield souvenirs, including a German Iron Cross medal.

  Wanting to be of some use, Mary volunteered for a Red Cross war drive in which she and other volunteers raised funds for the war effort. In the summer of 1918, she had to help getting in the harvest without the young men there to do it, and she wrote to Lloyd of the magnificent cherry harvest and that she was making his favorite cherry pies. In August she attended a “Chautauqua,” a Methodist summer camp with lectures, music, and religious instruction, which she and Lloyd had attended together the year before. She wrote that she was considering going into nursing, and Lloyd replied that it was a fine career but hoped “that this fuss will all be over before you ever have to get into it.”

  “… someday we will be the happiest boy and girl that there possibly can be anywhere in the world.”

  He had also changed jobs, in June 1918 being transferred to work for the postal service. His letters started to become more and more affectionate, and perhaps this was because he was now in the Vosges mountains near the Front, close enough to see some casualties of war, and it was all beginning to seem much more real. In one letter, dated June 24, 1918, he says he wants to take Mary “in his arms and kiss those sweet rosy lips again,” and that “someday we will be the happiest boy and girl that there possibly can be anywhere in the world.” Was he proposing marriage to her? Surely that must be how Mary read it back home. He couldn’t tell her where he was or the letter would be held back by the censors, but she followed the news of the war in the newspapers and must have been anxious for him every time she read the rumors that American troops were going to be involved in a “Big Push.”

  Looking across no-man’s-land towards German lines in the Meuse-Argonne region. Lloyd’s company suffered heavy losses when they advanced across this ground as part of the Grand Offensive of September 1918.

  MAIL SERVICE OVERSEAS

  Lloyd often complains in his letters that long stretches of time pass in which he receives no letters at all then four or five come at once after a mail ship docks. In fact, the addressing of army mail was a hit-and-miss business. Folks back home weren’t allowed to know where their loved ones were in France, so they could only address letters or parcels to a soldier care of his company, and non-military folk were sometimes unaware of the need to be specific in the details; there were dozens of Company Ks or 4th Divisions. Soldiers’ letters were supposed to be censored by the company commander so as to prevent sensitive information reaching enemy hands, while official censors did random checks on mail which could leave letters so mangled as to be illegible. British, French, and German troops generally got letters within a week of mailing, but for Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, it could be several weeks, so perishable goods sent in packages would arrive in unrecognizable condition. And in many cases, the family back home received letters from a soldier long after the telegram telling them of his death.

  Bit by bit, the 35th, Lloyd’s company, were getting closer to the fighting, traveling across France almost to the Swiss border, and on September 26, 1918, they found themselves in the front line of an offensive at Meuse-Argonne. This was part of the Grand Offensive right up and down the Western Front, in which British, French, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand troops who had survived thus far into the war were joined by the fresh wave of American troops and pushed forward against German lines. The strength and energy of this offensive is credited with demoralizing the Germans and bringing about the eventual surrender—though not without cost. Lloyd’s company suffered more casualties than any other US division as they progressed through heavily defended regions, taking hundreds of German prisoners. Lloyd wasn’t in battle with them because of his work for the postal service, but he wrote to Mary, “I have seen wounded men, my own soldiers in arms, coming back to the hospitals and, well, it just gets you.” He drove around the country roads in transporter trucks and frequently saw “a blinding flash
like a giant flash for photographic work” when a big shell landed in their vicinity, killing any who were close by. All around, the little towns they passed through had been reduced to rubble.

  The Wait to get Home

  In the fall of 1918, Mary’s family moved back to Kansas City and she took a job as a reporter for the Kansas City News Service, which published a number of trade magazines. Lloyd wrote that he was sure it was more suited to her than nursing because the nurses he had seen in France were on the go all the time and had to be physically very strong. She loved the job and did well at it, earning a pay increase. Lloyd wrote wistfully that he did not have a job to return to himself, having come into the war straight from school, but that after their work in France was done he would have more time to make plans. “It surely will be the happiest of happy days to be with you always,” he wrote.

  American soldiers escorting German prisoners in the Meuse-Argonne. Conditions for prisoners of war were dictated by the Hague and Geneva Conventions agreed upon before the war.

  By October, Lloyd was lodging in Bourges in the house of a Frenchwoman who had a great big fireplace, a piano, and some antique chairs. In the evenings some African-American soldiers played piano and sang, and Lloyd wrote, “I don’t believe I have enjoyed any music so much since coming across.” When the Americans first joined the war, the English had told them that it would last at least another two years. No one predicted that it would be over by November 11 that year, so the news of the Armistice was greeted with great joy by the French. “They are certainly a happy lot of people,” Lloyd wrote.