CHAPTER 3

IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED A HOBBIT

A few days before Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien set off for the Western Front in France, the greatest sea battle of the First World War began. On June 1, 1916, the British Grand Fleet challenged the German Navy in the North Sea. Known as the Battle of Jutland, a British force of twenty-eight battleships, nine battle cruisers, thirty-four light cruisers, and eighty destroyers clashed with twenty-four German battleships, five battle cruisers, eleven light cruisers, and sixty-three destroyers. It was a fearsome display of modern naval power.

British petty officer Ernest Francis, a gunner’s mate aboard the battle cruiser Queen Mary, jumped overboard after his ship was blown out of the water. “I struck away from the ship as hard as I could and must have covered nearly fifty yards when there was a big smash,” he wrote. “And coming behind me I heard a rush of water, which looked very like surf breaking on a beach and I realized it was the suction or backwash from the ship which had just gone.”1 The Queen Mary sank in ninety seconds, taking most of its thousand-man crew with her.

Given the casualties on both sides, there seemed to be no clear victor; citizens and soldiers alike were left wondering whether to celebrate a victory or mourn an inglorious defeat. “The one indisputable fact,” said a nurse at a London hospital, “was that hundreds of young men, many of them midshipmen only just in their teens, had gone down without hope of rescue or understanding of the issues to a cold, anonymous grave.”² The losses were indeed devastating: a total of 6,097 British sailors perished at sea, compared to 2,551 Germans.

Among those caught up in the battle was Christopher Wiseman, a member of Tolkien’s “Tea Club and Barrovian Society,” or TCBS, a semi-secret society of friends who first met in 1911 at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Though others were included, its core members were Tolkien, Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. All of them, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, were drawn into the First World War as soldiers. Tolkien’s circle shared a love of literature and a powerful desire to leave their mark on the world. Wiseman must have left his mark on Tolkien, because he named his son, Christopher, after him.

Before being sent off to war, members of the TCBS held a “Council” meeting at Wiseman’s house in London, an exalted title borrowed, no doubt, from the diplomatic jargon of the day. They talked late into the night, sharing with one another their deepest convictions and aspirations. Given their evident loyalty to one another throughout the war years, they must have vowed to preserve their fellowship in whatever way they could. Tolkien later said it was at this moment that he first became aware of “the hopes and ambitions” that would propel him throughout his life.3

At about the same time that Tolkien enlisted in the British Expeditionary Force, Wiseman had joined the Navy and was assigned to the HMS Superb, part of the British Grand Fleet during the Battle of Jutland. He survived the encounter.

Meanwhile, the Germans staged another major assault at Verdun, a French outpost along the River Meuse, about 150 miles east of Paris. The Battle of Verdun—the longest battle of the war—had already been raging for fifteen weeks. Launched on February 21, 1916, it was an attempt to “bleed France white” by attacking a strategic fortress town and luring the French army into a fatal defensive. If successful, the assault would have knocked France out of the war and forced Britain to go it alone.

At the start of the battle, more than 140,000 German troops, supported by 1,200 artillery guns, began pounding French fortifications. The eight-mile sector of the German lines “erupted into a blaze of artillery the likes of which the world had never seen.”⁴ Woods were converted to stumps and craters. A French soldier described the scene thus: “Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club.”⁵

By the end of April, casualties at Verdun totaled 133,000 for the French and 120,000 for the Germans—with no end in sight. In the first week of June, the Germans turned their sights on Fort Vaux, and a savage fight for the outpost began. “It is maddening,” wrote a French soldier. “One sees . . . a continuous cloud of smoke everywhere. Trees leap into the air like wisps of straw; it is an unheard-of spectacle.”6 After a heroic defense, the French commander surrendered only because his men were literally dying of thirst.⁷ “Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing,” wrote a French lieutenant in his diary at Verdun. “Hell cannot be so terrible.”⁸ The hellish campaign at Verdun would drag on until December 1916.

LEAVING THE LONELY ISLE

News of these battles, of their ferocity and destructiveness, was in the air as twenty-four-year-old Tolkien disembarked on June 4, 1916. Trained as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, his preparation could hardly have equipped him for the realities that lay ahead. He seemed to sense as much, for he did not expect to return home alive. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien recalled. “Parting from my wife then . . . it was like a death.”⁹

As he crossed the English Channel, Tolkien gazed back at his island home and turned his thoughts into poetry.¹⁰ His short poem, “The Lonely Isle,” suggests his deep sadness as his familiar world slipped further and further from sight:

Down the great wastes and in gloom apart

I long for thee and thy fair citadel.

Where echoing through the lighted elms at eve

In a high inland tower there peals a bell:

O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!¹¹

It is easy to imagine Tolkien, the untested soldier, drawing on this moment of separation when he described scenes of parting in The Lord of the Rings. Recall Frodo’s dark realization as he prepares to leave the Shire: “This would mean exile, a flight from danger to danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone. . . . But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.”12

As we’ve seen, there was an immense feeling of patriotic duty as Britain entered the conflict, a desire to “do one’s bit” for King and Country. “I have implicit confidence in you, my soldiers,” King George told the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914. “Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done.”¹³ Droves of men responded to the call with a kind of “intense, almost mystical patriotism.”¹⁴

Relying on an all-volunteer military, Lord Kitchener, Secretary for War, initially called for another one hundred thousand men to bolster the regular army. But young men flooded recruitment offices so that by the spring of 1915 there were six hundred thousand additional men under arms. The Birmingham Daily Post, Tolkien’s hometown paper, left no doubt about the obligation of the hour: “Patriotism insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation.”¹⁵ As Tolkien described the mood: “In those days, chaps signed up or were scorned publicly.”¹⁶

Men enlisted together, forming “Pals’ Battalions” drawn from their networks of families, friendships, and work relationships. “It is a story of a spontaneous and genuinely popular mass movement which has no counterpart in the modern, English-speaking world,” writes John Keegan in The Face of Battle, “and perhaps could have none outside of its own time and place.”¹⁷

At the beginning of 1916, there were nearly a million British troops on the Continent, and the number was increasing by about one hundred thousand every month. A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, marveled at the “really astonishing” numbers of volunteers. “The revelation has been the outpouring of service both of men and women from the heart of a nation which its enemies thought was lost in comfort and wrapped in ignoble ease.”18 Yet Britain still relied on an all-volunteer army, and the numbers were insufficient to meet the demands of the war. Compared to the large continental armies of Germany and France, the British Expeditionary Force in early 1916 was still modest in size. German Kaiser Wilhelm II called the British army “contemptibly small.”

Most importantly, twenty-two months of carnage had produced a military stalemate along the Western Front. The British government was determined to tilt the balance of forces. On January 27, 1916, Parliament passed the Military Service Act, introducing conscription to Britain for the first time. All men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were required to enlist. “It was a nasty cleft to be in,” Tolkien wrote many years later, “especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”¹⁹

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE TRENCHES

By the summer of 1916, the initial enthusiasm for war was fading. More than two hundred thousand British soldiers now lay dead, and another three hundred thousand wounded.²⁰ Soldiers kept on fighting—there was a remarkable loyalty among recruits of all ranks—but there was also a deepening sobriety, a grim determination to hold on. Abel Ferry lost not only his zeal for battle, but many of his cherished convictions: “Idealism is dupery,” he wrote in 1916. “The world belongs to those who don’t believe in ideas.”²¹ TCBS member Rob Gilson had joined the Cambridgeshire Battalion as a second lieutenant. Like Tolkien, he was sent to the Western Front, where he encountered conditions previously unimaginable. “I could almost cry sometimes at the universal mud,” he wrote, “and the utter impossibility of escaping from it.”22

What Gilson described was the defining, iconic symbol of the war: the trench. For the typical British soldier, life in these elaborate ditches was a quagmire of cold, wet, rat-infested squalor. The trenches were deep enough to shelter a soldier and narrow enough to avoid direct hits from artillery fire. Every few yards a trench zigzagged, to limit the damage from mortar or machine-gun attacks. Trench walls, supported by sandbags, were in a constant state of decay. Trench floors, even if covered with wooden duckboards, filled up with water during heavy rains. “In two-and-a-half miles of trench which I waded yesterday,” wrote Wilfred Owen to his mother, “there was not one inch of dry ground.”²³

Rats roamed about at will. Gorging themselves on human remains, some were the size of a cat. Disgusted and harassed by them, soldiers would shoot them, bayonet them, or club them to death. “We borrowed a large cat and shut it up at night to exterminate them, and found the place empty next morning,” recorded a soldier in his diary. “The rats must have eaten it up, bones, fur, and all, and dragged it to their holes.”²⁴

As bad as the water, mud, rats, roaches, and lice was the smell: the stench of decaying flesh, human and animal, seemed to cover everything. Snipers, grenades, random shell fire, untreated wounds, disease—any number of causes made death, and the smell of death, a constant presence for soldiers on the front line. Writes historian John Keegan: “You could smell the front line miles before you could see it.”²⁵

The trenches provided the setting for much of the suffering and lethality of the war. They formed a base of operations for each side’s military, offering a measure of protection for soldiers and creating a demarcation line behind which the heavy guns were nested. “Millions of men for months occupied almost unchanging positions within close range of the enemy,” explains historian Max Hastings. “Rigorous discipline became necessary to avoid exposing even an inch of flesh.”26

During an assault, shells of death flew overhead in both directions, eventually finding their mark. “It exploded, and a cloud of black reek went up,” wrote a British captain during an assault on a trench line. The explosion, he explained, threw up the earth and buried two or more soldiers alive. “You dug furiously. . . . At last you get them out, three dead, grey muddy masses, and one more jabbering live one. Then another shell falls and more are buried.”²⁷

No soldier, especially one with Tolkien’s literary cast of mind, could ever forget the experience. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Tolkien already had discovered that he was drawn to ancient legends and the languages in which they were embedded. Not even the demands of active combat could completely distract him from his passion. He began writing bits and pieces of the legends that would form the basis of his epic trilogy: “The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918—when time allowed.”²⁸

Thus the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings possess a grim authenticity. When Tolkien describes the Siege of Gondor—where the “fires leaped up” and “great engines crawled across the field” and the ground “was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain”—he delivers the realism of the war veteran. “Busy as ants hurrying orcs were digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring, just out of bowshot from the walls,” he wrote in The Return of the King. “And soon yet more companies of the enemy were swiftly setting up, each behind the cover of a trench, great engines for the casting of missiles.”29

SLAUGHTER AT THE SOMME

In an effort to take pressure off the French forces and achieve a breakthrough in the conflict, the British conceived of a major offensive of their own, to begin in the summer of 1916. Winston Churchill, who had just returned to the Western Front as a battalion commander, warned the House of Commons against “futile offensives” that would kill thousands of young men overnight. Nevertheless, plans were drawn up for a renewed attack that would permanently alter Tolkien’s life, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of English soldiers: the Battle of the Somme.

The weather on the morning of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme offensive, “was of the kind commonly called heavenly.” Below, however, beginning at 7:00 a.m., British aircraft and artillery were raining down hell on German positions along the river. In just over an hour, nearly a quarter of a million shells—about thirty-five hundred shells a minute—were fired at the Germans. The roar was so loud that it was heard in North London, nearly two hundred miles away.

The British, in fact, had been pounding their targets for a week with heavy artillery. Soldiers were assured that this last burst of firepower would destroy what was left of the German wire, obliterate the deepest dugouts, and severely compromise German artillery power. Crossing No Man’s Land, that dreadful death zone stretching between the opposing enemy trenches, would be a song. “You will be able to get over the top with a walking stick,” one battalion was told, “you will not need rifles.”30

At 7:30 a.m., to the sound of whistles, drums, and bagpipes, nearly one hundred thousand British troops climbed out of their trenches and attacked along the entire fourteen-mile front. They were confident of victory, even exuberant.

What they did not know was that the bombardment had not penetrated most of the German dugouts, or destroyed the wire, or knocked out the German heavy artillery. What they did not suspect was that they were “plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination.”³¹ Hundreds of German field guns and howitzers were turned on the advancing British troops, with devastating effect. “When we started to fire we just had to load and reload,” said a German machine-gunner. “They went down in their hundreds. We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”³²

Before the sun sank beyond the grey banks of the River Somme, 19,420 British soldiers—Lloyd George called them “the choicest and best of our young manhood”—lay dead.³³ Most were killed in the first hour of the attack, many within the first minutes. Another 40,000 were wounded. Many battalions endured casualty rates (dead and wounded) of over 50 percent. Thus, July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, marks the deadliest single day in British military history. “The agony of war took its toll on the Somme in full measure,” writes Martin Gilbert in The Somme. “The heroism and horror of war were seen there without disguise, unembellished and unadorned.”³⁴

The Somme offensive would rage, inconclusively, until November 16—nearly five months of bloodletting that claimed more than 1.2 million dead and wounded. And to what end? “In offensive terms, the advance had achieved nothing,” concludes John Keegan. “Most of the dead were killed on ground the British held before the advance began.”35 Winston Churchill, who was on the front lines in 1916 as a lieutenant colonel, saw “a welter of slaughter” from beginning to end. “No strategic advantage of any kind had been gained.”³⁶ One commanding officer reported stoically: “It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valor, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”³⁷

Among the dead was TCBS member Rob Gilson. Two nights before he was killed, Gilson had written home: “Guns firing at night are beautiful—if they were not so terrible. They have the grandeur of thunderstorms. But how one clutches at the glimpses of peaceful scenes. It would be wonderful to be a hundred miles from the firing line once again.”³⁸

Though he entered the war with great anxiety over his own capacities under the stress of battle, Gilson distinguished himself in his final moments. When his commanding officer was killed, Gilson took over and led his men “perfectly calmly and confidently” into No Man’s Land.³⁹ His friend could not have been far from Tolkien’s thoughts when, in The Lord of the Rings, he described as “curiously tough” the hobbits of the Shire. “They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they . . . could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.”⁴⁰

INTO THE LINE

News of Gilson’s death did not reach Tolkien for several weeks. As the battalion signals officer of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien’s job was to maintain communication between the army staff directing the battle and the officers in the field. His tools included flares, signal lights, carrier pigeons, runners, and telephones. His was a vital link in the chain of command, since the information gathered in the field would direct artillery fire and deploy—or withdraw—troops as needed. Breakdowns in communication could cost hundreds, even thousands, of lives.

In the days before the Somme offensive, Tolkien and the eight hundred men of his Fusiliers unit were held back in a battle-ready support role, perhaps thirteen miles from the front. But on July 3, the third day of the battle, they headed for Bouzincourt, a village just three miles behind the line. Once they arrived, soldiers occupied every house, barn, cellar, and orchard.41

In an earlier war, the men would have been at a safe enough distance from the fighting to play a game of cricket. But not in this war with its new technologies of destruction. Chief among them was artillery, comprised of a wide variety of long-range weapons: field artillery, made up of 18-pounder guns and 4.5-inch howitzers, which could fire small shrapnel or high explosives to a range of six thousand yards; medium artillery, comprised of 60-pounder guns that could send explosive shells ten thousand yards; and trench mortars, which could lob four-inch bombs from one trench to another across No Man’s Land.⁴² Artillery carried the advantage not only of distance but of speed: thanks to hydraulic mechanisms and timing devices, the “shells” could be delivered to the enemy more rapidly, accurately, and for longer periods than anything ever seen in warfare. “For the first time in history, and from the beginning of the war to the end, artillery dominated,” writes G. J. Meyer. “It did more killing between 1914 and 1918 than any other weapon.”⁴³

As Tolkien lay in a hut, probably reading letters from his wife, a German field gun bombarded the village. Tolkien, on the Western Front and caught up in one of the deadliest exchanges of the war, came under fire for the first time in his life.

How might the young soldier have drawn on this moment to describe the enormity of war in The Lord of the Rings? “This is no longer a bickering at the fords, raiding from Ithilien and from Anorien, ambushing and pillaging,” says Beregond, a soldier in Gondor’s army. “This is a great war long planned, and we are but one piece in it, whatever pride may say.”44 Could this same moment have informed the anguish of Frodo Baggins after leaving the Shire and facing the Black Riders? “In that lonely place Frodo for the first time fully realized his homelessness and danger,” Tolkien wrote. “He wished bitterly that his fortune had left him in the quiet and beloved Shire. He stared down at the hateful Road, leading back westward—to his home.”⁴⁵

Reflecting on his experiences years later, Tolkien acknowledged that his taste for fantasy was “quickened to full life by war” and that “the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914–18 war.”⁴⁶ Much of the “early parts” of his epic, he explained, were “done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”⁴⁷ In other words, Tolkien had begun to lay the foundation for his war trilogy.

The immediate challenge, though, was to stay alive. “Tolkien and his signalers were always vulnerable,” explains Martin Gilbert. The village of Bouzincourt avoided much of the barrage, but wounded men from other areas of the front, many of them horribly mutilated, arrived by the hundreds. Members of Tolkien’s battalion began digging graves.

Tolkien was especially anxious over the fate of two of his friends from the TCBS. He knew that Gilson was in the thick of the fighting on July 1, but nothing else. Nor did he know what had happened to Geoffrey Smith, another member of his inner circle. Remarkably, Smith appeared in Bouzincourt on July 6, alive and unharmed. Tolkien was overcome with joy, and the two met as often as they could amid the clamor of activity. They walked together in a field of poppies, strangely untouched by mortar fire, and talked about poetry, the war, and the future. The next day Smith’s company, the Salford Pals, left for the trenches to support the British assault on Ovillers, a German stronghold.48

In Tolkien and the Great War, biographer John Garth describes the scene as Tolkien’s turn for battle arrived on July 14, when his brigade was sent to reinforce the Ovillers campaign.⁴⁹ The night sky was flush with bursting shells and flares. Small wooden crosses dotted the landscape. Along the way they encountered many wounded taken from the battlefield. “So it was on the approach to Ovillers that Tolkien first encountered the lost of the Somme,” Garth writes, “heralded by their stench, darkly hunched or prone, or hanging on the wire until a stab of brightness revealed them, the bloated and putrescent dead.”⁵⁰

The British line was a matrix of confusion and frustration. Phone lines running back to headquarters were easily tapped and could only be used as a last resort. Flags, flares, and lamps were also of limited use, since they attracted enemy fire. Most messages had to be sent by runners, who could be picked off by snipers. Thus, soldiers were effectively fighting in a “zone of mystery,” with no sense of the enemy’s movements or how to gain strategic advantage. “The job of the signaler was to shed some light on the mystery by helping set up a battlefield communications system and using it,” according to Garth. “In practice this was an almost hopeless task.”51

Worst of all was the scene in and around the trenches. The bodies of dead soldiers lay everywhere: disfigured by shells, with woeful eyes or faces blown off entirely. The wounded moaned or wept with grief. Beyond the trenches, in No Man’s Land, was a landscape of lifeless desolation. Trees had been reduced to blackened sticks. The air was dense with smoke and the stench of explosives and unburied corpses. Grass and crops had been swallowed up by waves of mud.

After a heavy rain, it was commonplace to see the bodies of soldiers lying facedown in pools or lakes of muddy water; once injured, their sixty-pound packs sealed their fate. A young British officer reported finding bodies of soldiers wounded on July 1 who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets around them, taken out their Bibles and died like that.”⁵² War correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs saw more than most. “Dead bodies were heaped there, buried and unburied,” he wrote. “Men dug into corruption when they tried to dig a trench. Men sat on dead bodies when they peered through their periscopes. They ate and slept with the stench of death in their nostrils.”⁵³

THE ANIMAL HORROR OF WAR

Just before midnight on July14, 1916, Tolkien and the Lancashire Fusiliers were waiting in reserve as their comrades in the 7th Brigade launched the next assault at Ovillers-la-Boisselle. They were repelled. A second attack was planned for 2:00 a.m., and this time Tolkien’s battalion, with bayonets fixed, would lead it. But enemy machine-gun fire and barbed wire thwarted their assault. The battalions fell back for the night.54

The next day they were at it again, exchanging bombs, hand grenades, and machine-gun fire with the enemy. The assault lasted all day. The ground, according to one survivor, was “torn up by shells and littered with dead bodies.”⁵⁵ At sunset a white flag appeared at the German garrison at Ovillers: surrender. Tolkien, unharmed but physically and emotionally exhausted, had endured fifty hours of combat. Years later he described this period as “the animal horror of the life of active service.”⁵⁶

Upon returning to Bouzincourt, Tolkien found a terse and anxious note from G. B. Smith, explaining that Rob Gilson had been killed on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. “Do please stick to me, you and Christopher,” Smith wrote. “I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news.”⁵⁷ Smith turned his grief into poetry, and wrote a tribute to Gilson:

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. . . .

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.⁵⁸

Writing to Smith, Tolkien described the love he felt for their fallen friend, “which I only realize now, more and more daily, that he has gone.” Tolkien praised Gilson’s “holiness of courage, suffering, and sacrifice.” But he lamented the “bitter winnowing” of their number by the loss of their comrade. “I feel . . . immeasurably weaker and poorer now.” King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the birthplace of Tolkien’s TCBS, held a minute of silence to honor the forty-two graduates killed in 1916. Among their sad roster was Robert Gilson. He was twenty-two years old.

“I do not know what is to be our move next or what is in store,” Tolkien wrote to Smith. “Rumor is as busy as the universal weariness of all this war allows it to be. I wish I could know where you are.”59 With a friend dead, others missing, and a horrible battle raging around him, we can only imagine the condition of Tolkien’s soul. Yet it brings to mind a moment in The Lord of the Rings, when Merry, cut off from the Fellowship, finds himself friendless and alone in the midst of their great quest. “Everyone he cared for had gone away into the gloom that hung over the distant eastern sky; and little hope at all was left in his heart that he would ever see any of them again.”⁶⁰

After just six days’ rest in Bouzincourt, Tolkien was sent back into the line. From that point on, writes John Garth, “he lived almost constantly in a dugout.”⁶¹ The Fusiliers rehearsed for an attack on Regina Trench, the longest trench in the German line. Although it was of dubious strategic value, it already had cost the lives of many thousands of men. Canadian troops had seized and then lost a section of the trench. Another attack had failed, leaving many dead and wounded. Like so many other battles in the war, the campaign had become an ordeal of attrition.

Tolkien’s battalion was ready to begin their attack on the afternoon of October 19, 1916. But heavy rains delayed the assault for forty-eight hours. Weariness and anxiety were surely taking their toll on Tolkien and the Fusiliers as they imagined climbing out of their dugouts and into the blood and smoke and shelling of No Man’s Land. “The fifteen minutes before ‘going over’ have a peculiar eeriness all their own,” wrote a Scottish private. “As the zero hour approaches . . . we are left with nothing to take our minds off the dragging minutes.”62 Tolkien captured moments like this in The Lord of the Rings, where he most often seems to identify with the plight of the hobbits:

Now he was one small soldier in a city preparing for a great assault, clad in the proud but somber manner of the Tower of the Guard. In some other time and place Pippin might have been pleased with his new array, but he knew now that he was taking part in no play; he was in deadly earnest the servant of a grim master in the greatest peril.⁶³

What sustained Tolkien and his fellow soldiers? “The honor of my battalion and its opinion of me,” wrote one officer. “These are now my sustaining motives in the game of war.”⁶⁴ The resolve and discipline of British troops in the face of massive casualties during the battle remains one of the most remarkable facts of the First World War. “None could help thinking of what the next few hours would bring,” wrote a soldier. “One minute’s anguish and then, once in the ranks, faces became calm and serene, a kind of gravity falling upon them, while on each could be read the determination and expectation of victory.”⁶⁵

Finally, just after noon on October 21, the first two waves of infantrymen scrambled from their narrow trenches, followed by Tolkien’s signalers. Success: at 12:20 p.m., Tolkien, who was running the signals operation, told brigade headquarters that scores of Germans were surrendering. His division alone captured seven hundred German soldiers.

Yet their victory was not without cost: at least 41 Fusiliers were dead or missing, another 117 were wounded, many grievously. Many in Tolkien’s division were cut down by their own artillery, casualties of the inescapable fog of war. Rev. Mervyn Evers, the battalion chaplain, appeared the next day, covered in blood. He had spent the entire night in No Man’s Land, enduring German artillery fire and fierce cold, tending the wounded and comforting the dying.66

A week later Tolkien’s battalion was on a train to Ypres, the scene of some of the most devastating battles of the war. Yet Tolkien was not with them; he was stricken with “trench fever,” a bacterium that entered the bloodstream through lice. He was transported to an officers’ hospital to recover. Chronic ill health sent him back to England on November 8, 1916, to recuperate at Birmingham University’s wartime hospital.

A few weeks later, in December 1916, Tolkien received another sad letter, this time from Christopher Wiseman, his friend who survived the Battle of Jutland. In what should have been a safe zone, G. B. Smith was hit by a German shell fragment while walking along a road in the village of Souastre, north of Bouzincourt. An infection set in, and four days later he was dead.

It was a grievous blow. Smith had begun to write poetry during the war and shared it with Tolkien whenever he could. To honor his friend’s memory, Tolkien edited a collection of his poems after the war and published them under the title Spring Harvest. In the foreword to the book, Tolkien noted that poems such as “The Burial of Sophocles” were written under fire: “The final version was sent to me from the trenches.” Shortly before his death, Smith had written to Tolkien with a sense of foreboding: “May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say so long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.”67

A VISION OF MORDOR

Mostly confined to a sickbed in England, Tolkien faced a grim accounting. Gilson and Smith were dead. So was Ralph Stuart Payton, another member of the TCBS. He, too, had fought at the Somme. He was killed in action on July 22, 1916, his body never identified. Gone also was Thomas Kenneth “Tea Cake” Barnsley, who was in the debating society with Tolkien. He served as a captain in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was buried alive by a trench mortar, escaped—only to be killed in action near Ypres in June 1917.

Trench fever probably spared Tolkien’s life. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers went back into action on May 27, 1918, near the River Aisne, and sustained enormous casualties. The entire battalion was presumed dead or taken prisoner.

Still recovering from his illness, Tolkien was nevertheless strong enough to begin sketching out the foundation for his epic story. He of course retained his love of medieval literature, especially the themes of beauty and mortality in works such as Beowulf. Years later, in his groundbreaking essay, “On Translating Beowulf,” Tolkien offered an insight into the poignant vision of the work that so absorbed him: “The poet who spoke these words saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life, until the hour of fate when all things should perish.”68

Whatever else informed Tolkien’s literary vision, we cannot overlook the backdrop of war: the life-and-death struggle that harasses every front-line soldier, the “animal horror” of trench warfare, the staggering desolation of No Man’s Land.⁶⁹ The scenes at the Battle of the Somme, especially the early days of slaughter and futility, could not fail to leave their mark on the human conscience. Might Tolkien have had in mind his comrades, those who fell at the Somme, when he described the Siege of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings?

Yet their Captain cared not greatly what they did or how many might be slain: their purpose was only to test the strength of the defense and to keep the men of Gondor busy in many places. All before the walls on either side of the Gate the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet still driven as by a madness more and more came up.⁷⁰

Indeed, it would be remarkable if the destruction Tolkien witnessed along the Western Front did not find expression in his creative works. “The horror of these landscapes is that they are not naturally produced but are a product of man’s destructive misuse of technology,” writes Nancy Marie Ott. “Battlefields like this simply did not exist before World War I.”⁷¹

Thus on the desolate path to Mordor we encounter “dead grasses and rotting reeds” that “loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.”⁷² We see “a land defiled, diseased beyond healing.”⁷³ We watch Sam Gamgee, during the passage through the marshes, catch his foot and fall on his hands, “which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mire.” Looking intently into the glazed and grimy muck, he is startled by what he finally sees. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!” Gollum laughed. “The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,” he cackled.74

War historian Martin Gilbert, in a chance interview with Tolkien at Oxford in the 1960s, spoke with him about his experience at the Battle of the Somme. “Tolkien remembered, as vividly as if it were yesterday, the constant danger of German artillery shells, ranging throughout the area, falling with their screech and roar, and clouds of earth and mud, and the fearful cries of men who had been hit.”⁷⁵ Gilbert, who wrote a definitive account of the Somme offensive, noted that Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes matches precisely the macabre experience of the soldiers in that battle: “Many soldiers on the Somme had been confronted by corpses, often decaying in the mud, that had lain undisturbed, except by the bombardment, for days, weeks and even months.”⁷⁶

In a letter to L. W. Forster, written in December 1960, Tolkien confirmed the influence of the war on his story, at least in his description of its bleak landscapes: “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”⁷⁷

THE COURAGE OF QUITE SMALL PEOPLE

Not all Tolkien’s war experiences, however, produced such dark narratives. In a letter to W. H. Auden, he explained how the idea for The Hobbit—the prequel to The Lord of the Rings—first came into his mind. It happened years after the war, after he had become Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, while he was sitting and grading student papers. “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. . . . Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like.”78

We don’t know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering in that dreary “hole in the ground,” the front-line trench.

Most of the members of the British Expeditionary Force were “citizen soldiers,” drawn largely from the working classes. Unlike the French, Italian, Russian, and German armies, the BEF did not experience a large-scale collapse in discipline or morale.⁷⁹ Even during the most intensive campaigns along the Western Front, they showed a “remarkable resilience” relative to other armies.⁸⁰ The change in character that comes over Sam Gamgee was probably not unlike the transformation that Tolkien must have witnessed among many of his fellow soldiers in battle: “But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.”⁸¹

If this was the character of the British soldier in the Great War, then it explains the admiration of Tolkien and many others over the years. As John Keegan concludes in The Face of Battle: “The British Expeditionary Force of 1916 was one of the most remarkable and admirable military formations ever to have taken the field.”82 In his magisterial work, The World Crisis, Winston Churchill extolled the qualities of the British army with his usual eloquence: “Unconquerable except by death . . . they set up a monument of native virtue which will command the wonder, the reverence and the gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among men.”⁸³ Even Sir Philip Gibbs, who became severely critical of military leadership, confessed his astonishment at the valor of British troops, praising the “individual courage beyond the normal laws of human nature as I thought I knew them once.”⁸⁴

Historians still debate the ultimate achievement of these soldiers, and the causes for which they fought. Were they merely fodder for a vast and merciless military machine that ravaged Europe to no good end? Or did they play a vital role in halting German aggression and preventing the dominance of a brutal and oppressive juggernaut over the Continent? Whatever Tolkien thought about these questions, he was careful never to demean the significance of the soldier at his post: “I have always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” The hobbits were made small, he explained, “to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’ ”⁸⁵

Tolkien the soldier lived among these “ordinary men,” fought alongside them, witnessed their courage under fire, joked with them, mourned with them, and watched them die. Thus the “small people” who fought and suffered in the Great War helped inspire the creation of the unlikely heroes in Tolkien’s greatest imaginative work. Like the soldiers in that war, the homely hobbits could not have perceived how the fate of nations depended upon their stubborn devotion to duty.