CHAPTER 4

THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WAR

On September 30, 1914, barely a month after British troops were deployed to the Western Front, C. S. Lewis wrote his father from Great Bookham. Lewis had just arrived to study the classics with his father’s former tutor, William Thompson Kirkpatrick, and he was dumbstruck by the beauty of an English village seemingly unmolested by time. Yet the mood of “perfect restfulness” that Lewis first observed upon his arrival was slipping away.¹

England had hoped to remain out of the war, but the Kaiser’s decision on August 4 to send German troops through Belgium compelled Britain to intervene. The British prime minister declared war on Germany the same day, and military recruitment campaigns were immediately launched around the country. Posters delivered the message: “Men of the Empire to Arms! God Save the King!” “If England Falls You Fall!” “The Empire Needs Men!” and “It is Nice in the Surf but What About the Men in the Trenches? Go and Help.” Thus Lewis wrote: “There is a good deal of war fever raging here, as is natural.”2

There would be a good deal more in the weeks and months ahead. British troops could not prevent a German takeover of the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the strategic port city of Antwerp. By October 6, round-the-clock German shelling sent sixty thousand Belgian troops fleeing the city. Soon thousands of refugees arrived in England, and in Great Bookham there were plans to take them in. Wrote Lewis to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”

Meanwhile, German submarines were operating in the Irish Sea, posing a threat to civilian travel. “There is the frightful prospect of living on opposite sides of the channel for two, five, or six years,” Lewis complained. “That of course is unthinkable.”³ Talk of German spies was rampant.

Soldiers on leave, many bearing the wounds of battle, were returning to England with grim stories of combat. A former student of Kirkpatrick’s, Oswald Smythe, arrived at Kirkpatrick’s house in March 1915 and made an impression on Lewis for his courage: “That Gerald Smythe of whom I told you, who lost an arm in the war, was staying with us last week. He is really wonderful: he has only been out of bed about a month and is going back to the front again next week. It does one good to see a person thoroughly cheerful under circumstances like this, and actually eager to be there again.”⁴

Lewis did not share Smythe’s eagerness for battle, however. Perhaps his reading of Homer’s The Iliad, which he had begun a few weeks after the war broke out, had something to do with it. Although there is a notion that some British officers went into battle with The Iliad in their backpacks and the rage of Achilles in their hearts, Lewis was not one of them.5 Whatever elements of battle glory there are in The Iliad are more than offset by its scenes of suffering. As Bernard Knox observes in his introduction to the work, the men in Homer’s war story die in agony: they drop to their knees screaming, clawing the ground, moaning and gasping for life. “And death is the end,” writes Knox. “Homer offers no comforting vision of life beyond the grave.”⁶

Conversations with his older brother, Warren (“Warnie”), already a second lieutenant with the British Expeditionary Force, would have been equally sobering. Serving on the Western Front since November 1914, Warnie had seen enough slaughter for a lifetime. “I shall never be able to forget—a boy lay asleep on a bank and the mess by his head was his brains.”⁷ Not long after a visit with his brother, on leave in July 1915, Lewis noted in a diary that he “had ghastly dreams about the front and getting wounded last night.”⁸

In any event, Lewis was focused on his academic career; he wanted to explore his love of the classics and English literature and to cultivate friendships with like-minded scholars. Having been born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was still exempt from service in the British military. Not yet eighteen years old, he could not enlist—nor did he wish to. “Apropos of conscription, I sincerely hope that one of two things may happen,” he wrote his father. “Either that the war may be over before I am eighteen, or that conscription may not come into force before I have volunteered. I shouldn’t fancy going out to meet the others—as a conscript.”⁹

A TASTE OF GOODNESS

The whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men.10

What does it mean to have one’s imagination “converted” or “baptized” by a work of fantasy? In Lewis’s case, it seems that Phantastes rescued his imaginative cast of mind from its dark tendencies—made darker, perhaps, by the onset of the war—and introduced him to a “bright shadow,” a voice or force that drew him out of himself. It set before him a vision of a world that must have seemed wholly unlike his own: pure and radiant, yet morally severe.

Perhaps this was MacDonald’s intent. In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald hinted at one of his objectives in using the genre of the fairy tale. “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”11 Something, it seems, was awakened within Lewis, something that other authors had failed to summon. After the war, in a diary entry in 1923, Lewis hinted at the enormous importance he attached to the book: “After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book.”¹²

Lewis’s brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a close and lifelong friendship, called his discovery of MacDonald “a turning point in his life.”¹³ Biographers Roger Green and Walter Hooper regard the work as “the highlight among Lewis’s literary discoveries” during this time.¹⁴ Nearly forty years later, Lewis was still recommending MacDonald’s work to friends and acquaintances.¹⁵ Biographer George Sayer draws special attention to the book and the enduring power of its symbolism. “The influence of Phantastes on Jack lasted many years, perhaps all his life,” he writes. “It had a transforming influence on his attitude toward the ordinary, common things around him, imbuing them with its own spiritual quality.”16

A GATHERING STORM

That may be so in the long run, but the transformation described showed little sign of spilling over into Lewis’s exterior life. His letters during this period, when touching on matters of faith, were generally skeptical.

Lewis was also dismissive of the war, perhaps his way of putting its deadly prospect out of his mind. In a letter to Arthur Greeves in June 1915, he described “the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life.” She reminded Lewis of a beloved portion of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1. “If you will play that record over, trying to turn that music into a person, you will know just how she looked and talked. Just 18, and off to do some ridiculous war-work, nursing or something like that at Dover of all places—what a shame!”¹⁷

In a letter to his father, Lewis continued to speculate that peace would arrive before he was forced to make a decision about enlistment: “I think we may reasonably hope that the war will be over before it begins to concern me personally.”¹⁸ Such hopes, however, were already proving futile.

On June 15, German zeppelins attacked London, hitting the busy Waterloo Station. The action, aimed at terrorizing civilians, helped to harden public animosity against Germany. “The Zeppelins over Scarborough and London were harbingers of a new era in which death would rain down from the sky on defenseless town-dwellers,” writes historian Niall Ferguson.¹⁹ Lewis, staying at the Kirkpatrick home, could see electric flashes in the skies caused by the bomb explosions. If the wind was blowing just right, he could “hear the mutter and grumble of the far distant guns in France.”20

A year later the war was mired in stalemate. Conscription, which went into effect in January 1916, made Lewis’s decision for him. He could not remain behind while other men his age were sent to the front; he resigned himself to the prospect of enlisting.

“It makes me so sad to think I shall have only two more sets of holidays of the good old type,” he wrote, “for in November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’ of France, which I have no ambition to face.”²¹ Lewis wrote about a school friend, Donald Hardman, who was to be drafted into the military by Christmas. “He . . . wants to know what I am going to do. . . . Of course if it turned out to be convenient, I should like to have a friend with me in the army, but it is hardly worth while making any special provisions for so small a matter. We shall see how it all works out.”²²

On June 30, 1916—on the eve of the Battle of the Somme—Lewis wrote to his father expressing relief at the news that his father’s nephew, Richard Lewis, had been “safely wounded” in France and thus taken out of harm’s way. “It is by far the best thing that can happen to a man in the trenches.”

He was right, of course. Historians estimate that perhaps a third of all Allied casualties on the Western Front occurred in the trenches, either from enemy fire or disease. With twelve thousand miles of trenches on the Allied side alone, stretching from Flanders to the Swiss Alps, it is not hard to understand the death toll. Lewis mused that the “really unlucky ones” may serve without injury for a year or more—“always it would seem in the long run to be killed after returning from a leave.” The touch of fatalism is understandable, given the notorious depredations of trench warfare.

Indeed, in the same letter Lewis sensed that the war was entering a new phase of suffering: “Things look pretty black at present, don’t they?”23 The next day, on July 1, things were to become exponentially darker, as British and French troops launched the Somme offensive, a frenzy of concentrated killing that had almost no historical precedent in the annals of warfare.

THE CASE AGAINST GOD

Two weeks later, on July 14, as Tolkien and his men were preparing for their campaign at Ovillers, Lewis wrote to his father about “big news from the front” involving the Ulster Volunteer Force. The Irish soldiers, by their dedication and heroism in battle, compelled the War Department to accept them as an integral part of the British Army. “I suppose the losses are felt very heavily in Belfast: here, nobody seems to have noticed anything.”²⁴

The losses Lewis had in mind were those sustained by the 36th Ulster Division on the first day of the Somme offensive. The Ulstermen had captured the Schwaben Redoubt, a German stronghold with a fortified bunker more than twenty feet deep. But by nightfall the Germans had driven them back, and many were caught between the Germans and their own artillery. At least two thousand Ulstermen—more than a tenth of all the British fatalities on July 1—died in the firefight.²⁵

Nevertheless, their courage earned them high honors. Four Victoria Crosses were awarded to men of the Ulster Division for their bravery on that opening day of the campaign. The first Victoria Cross of the Battle of the Somme was given to William McFadzean, from Belfast, who saved the lives of fellow soldiers by throwing his body onto two bombs tossed into a trench.

What effect was news of the war having on Lewis? It is hard to say. Many years later, speaking to another generation of young men caught up in a great war, Lewis insisted that war produced at least one benefit: it forced us to consider our own mortality. “If active service does not prepare a man for death,” he asked, “what conceivable concentration of circumstances would?”26 There is little sign in the summer of 1916, however, that he was intellectually preparing himself for anything other than an academic career.

A deepening atheism may have had something to do with it. Lewis was reared in the Anglican Church, but he came to associate Christianity with “ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” Church sermons seemed vapid and irrelevant.

Lewis’s doubts about God and Christianity were reinforced by his tutor, Kirkpatrick, under whom he studied before applying to Oxford. Kirkpatrick was, in Lewis’s words, “a hard, satirical atheist.” From Kirkpatrick Lewis learned that unexamined beliefs and assumptions must be taken to the woodshed. Hardly any subject was taboo, including the war, which had begun just weeks before Lewis came under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage. “The commonest metaphors would be questioned,” Lewis recalled, “till some bitter truth had been forced from its hiding place.”

Thus a typical early exchange:

L: “These fiendish German atrocities—”

K: “But are not fiends a figment of the imagination?”

L: “Very well, then; these brutish atrocities—”

K: “But none of the brutes does anything of the kind!”

L: “Well, what am I to call them?”

K: “Is it not plain that we must call them simply Human?”27

Kirkpatrick’s ruthless rationality—like “red beef and strong beer”—exerted an enduring influence on his student. Lewis embraced the necessity of logic and reason, even as he pursued literary Romanticism. He learned not to abandon his conclusions, especially about spiritual matters, just because they might be unpopular. Shortly after the war, upon hearing of Kirkpatrick’s death, Lewis recalled the enormous impact of his mentor on his life. “It is however no sentiment, but plainest fact to say that I at least owe him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another,” he wrote to his father. “It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him—and this I shall be the better for as long as I live.”²⁸

Nevertheless, in a series of letters to Arthur Greeves, Lewis defended his atheism with arguments that were perfectly in sync with the intellectual fashions of his day. “You ask me my religious view: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion,” he wrote. “There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.”²⁹

Emerging academic disciplines such as psychology and sociology explained the rise of Christianity and other belief systems as primitive man’s attempt to cope with a frightening and dangerous world. Thus, for Lewis, Christianity was “one mythology among many”—and as false as all the others. “All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki.” Great men came to be regarded by their followers as gods, Lewis explained, around whom a cult emerged. “Now all this you must have heard before,” he wrote. “It is the recognized scientific account of the growth of religions.”30

He advised Greeves to direct his own intellectual questions into the study of philosophy: “Its probings would at least save you from the intellectual stagnation that usually awaits a man who has found complete satisfaction in some traditional religious system.”³¹ If Lewis considered himself an atheist, he was a soft atheist; he would not completely rule out the possibility of something existing outside the material world. He admitted that “the universe is an absolute mystery,” and that new discoveries about the world should be expected and welcomed. “In the meantime,” he wrote, “I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (and already decaying) superstition.”

When Lewis personally encountered the “unskilled butchery of the first German war,” the attempt to reconcile a loving God with the problem of suffering appeared futile.³² As we’ll explore later, Lewis would write a series of poems, called Spirits in Bondage, expressing his distress over the failure of religious belief. The burden of belief, especially in wartime, would become intolerable.

A TREATY WITH REALITY

A more immediate burden, however, was now upon him. Just as Tolkien’s military career was drawing to a close, Lewis enlisted in the British Expeditionary Force. In December 1916 he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and hoping to secure an officer’s commission, joined the Officers’ Training Corps.

When Lewis arrived at Oxford on April 16, 1917, he found the university cluttered with a “huge mass of military people.” Wounded soldiers, cared for by a staff of nurses, occupied an entire quad of the college.33 The cadets training for commissions were “a rather bad lot,” Lewis complained, and are “busily engaged in eating and drinking on their splendid pay, for tomorrow they die.”³⁴ Most everyone else was off to war.

Lewis endeavored to put the war out of his mind until the day he deployed for France. In a May 27 letter to Greeves, he bad-mouthed a “priggish, illiterate” freshman for talking incessantly of his brother and cousin who had been killed at the front. “Well of course I respect them for it, and I sympathize with him for losing them. At the same time, I don’t think they need be dragged into every single conversation, on every opportunity!”³⁵

Years later, recalling this period in his life, Lewis admitted that he “put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible.” He denied, though, that he was trying to evade reality. “I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality,” he wrote, “the fixing of a frontier.” It seems that Lewis made a pact with his country that left him at least partially in control: “You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind.”³⁶ Based on his letters to friends and family, he appeared to keep up his end of the treaty.

Almost immediately, Lewis began training for trench warfare. “We spend a good deal of time in ‘the trenches,’ ” he wrote to his father. He described the model trenches assembled on campus grounds, complete with dugouts, shell holes, and graves. “This last touch of realistic scenery,” he quipped, “seems rather superfluous.”³⁷ He was then sent across Oxford to Keble College, where he spent his days “trench digging and route marching under a blazing sun.”38

Nevertheless, little of the training Lewis received could prepare him for what he would encounter in combat: the mortars, machine guns, grenades, gas, or barbed wire. “All you do is lead your party onto parade, hand them over to their instructor, and then walk about doing nothing at all,” he wrote. “It is a little tiring to the legs and I think will finally result in atrophy of the brain.”³⁹

During his training Lewis became friends with two men who would have a profound effect on his life. One was Edward Francis “Paddy” Moore, an Irishman from Bristol—“quite a good fellow”—with whom he shared a room at university. The other was Laurence Bertrand Johnson, elected a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford, whom Lewis admired for his intellect and literary tastes. “I think the only real change that you will find in me is an increasing tendency towards philosophy,” he wrote Greeves, “which has grown in the course of many interesting talks with my good friend Johnson.”⁴⁰

THE ATHEIST IN A FOXHOLE

After three years of living with the knowledge of war, Lewis was ordered to deploy for France. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, a combat regiment. On November 17, 1917, he sailed from Southampton to Le Havre in Normandy, expecting to undergo more training. Instead, twelve days later, he was sent to the front line. He arrived on his nineteenth birthday.

Writing from a village close to the town of Arras, Lewis concealed from his father the potential danger. “I suppose we have no reason to grumble: this was bound to come sooner or later. There is no need to worry for a good time yet, and I’ll try and let you hear every day when there is.”41 Months later, Lewis would continue to shield his father from the truth of the trenches. “You will be anxious to hear my first impressions of trench life,” he wrote. “This is a very quiet part of the line and the dug outs are very much more comfortable than one imagines at home.”⁴²

In fact, Lewis’s company spent much of the bitter winter months in the trenches near Monchy-Le-Preux, a scene of intense fighting and destruction. The Germans were driven out of the village, but reestablished their trench line about five hundred yards east, roughly a stone’s throw from the British line.⁴³ On the day Lewis arrived, November 29, there was “considerable enemy shelling.” On the following day, his first day in the line, the enemy “shelled the trenches heavily practically all day.” A captain in his regiment was wounded.⁴⁴

“Through the winter,” Lewis wrote, “weariness and water were our chief enemies.”⁴⁵ Lewis learned to sleep while marching. He knew the feeling of ice-cold water filling up his boot when it struck hidden barbed wire. He encountered “the very old and the very recent dead” on the battlefield.⁴⁶ His experiences at Monchy-Le-Preux prompted Lewis to write a handful of poems about the war. In “French Nocturne,” he echoed the sense of dehumanization expressed by many war veterans:

Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread

And all is still; now even this gross line

Drinks in the frosty silences divine

The pale, green moon is riding overhead. . . .

What call have I to dream of anything?

Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.47

Biographer Alister McGrath believes that the merciless slaughter of war sharpened Lewis’s doubts about God. “His wartime experiences reinforced his atheism,” McGrath writes. “His poetry of the period rails against the silent, uncaring heaven.”⁴⁸ Although we cannot know for certain, it does seem that the shock of mortal combat stirred a fresh revulsion for the pious doctrines of his youth. In “De Profundis,” Lewis scorned the notion of a loving God who intervenes in human affairs:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,

For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.

The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.⁴⁹

Lewis escaped the “endless ruin” of war, temporarily at least, when he contracted trench fever and was removed from the front. In February 1918 he was sent to No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport, near the French coast. He immediately wrote his friend Arthur Greeves: “Here I am safely ensconced in a bed in hospital, miles away from the line, thank the gods, and therefore at last in a position to write you a more or less respectable letter.” It is hard to overstate the sense of relief that soldiers like Tolkien and Lewis experienced once they were taken out of harm’s way. Max Plowman, who survived the Battle of the Somme, wrote that to be safely out of the trenches “is like being born again.”50 Lewis called his hospital stay “an unmixed blessing.⁵¹

The blessing would not endure. Instead, after recovering, Lewis was rushed back to the front. “We have just come back from a four days tour in the front line during which I had about as many hours sleep,” he wrote his father on March 5. “Then . . . we spent the whole night digging.”⁵² Two weeks later, on March 19, Lewis and his battalion arrived at Fampoux, near Arras, and began preparations for a major assault.

THIS IS WHAT HOMER WROTE ABOUT

March 1918, in fact, was a moment of supreme danger for the Allies. The Communist Revolution in November 1917 had thrown Russia, a member of the Allied forces, into chaos. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, signed on March 3, 1918, took Russia out of the war—a potential disaster for the Allied cause. With Russia neutralized, Germany no longer needed to fight a war on two fronts: she could drive the British from the Somme and the French from the Aisne and achieve total victory on the Western Front. The German railway system began moving divisions from the Eastern Front westward into France, along with hundreds of heavy guns and machine guns. The Central Powers were preparing to launch a massive spring offensive, their “last great onslaught.”

The German attack commenced on March 21, with an artillery bombardment that lasted five hours. At least 6,000 German heavy guns, 3,000 mortars, 326 fighter aircraft, and hundreds of tons of mustard gas were hurled against the British lines. On the first day of the battle the Germans advanced more than four miles, taking 21,000 soldiers prisoner. Winston Churchill, visiting a front-line headquarters when the shelling began, barely escaped with his life.

Great Britain was sending thirty thousand troops a day into France, but they were not enough; the Allied effort was collapsing. “We cannot keep our divisions supplied with drafts for more than a short time at the present rate of loss,” British prime minister Lloyd George warned his ambassador in Washington DC. “This situation is undoubtedly critical and if America delays now she may be too late.”53

Under President Wilson, the United States had declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, promising the Allies hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits. But it took nearly a year before US “doughboys” began arriving in France. Although the Americans still lacked sufficient numbers to form their own brigades, Wilson gave the green light for US troops to join their British and French counterparts on the Western Front. Beginning on March 23, 1918, roughly a million American troops would arrive over the next six months. My grandfather, Michele Loconte, in the 91st Division of the First American Army, was among their ranks.

On March 24, the day after Wilson’s order, Germany crossed the River Somme, threatening to drive a wedge between the British and French armies. The German offensive would eventually be thwarted, but at a terrible cost.⁵⁴

Among the casualties in the opening days of the battle was Edward “Paddy” Moore, second lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and Lewis’s friend from his Oxford days. Moore was last seen on March 24, defending a position against a much larger German force. Lewis had forged a close bond with Moore, his sister, and their mother, Mrs. Janie King Moore. Lewis and Moore promised each other that if either one of them was killed, the other would care for his surviving parent—a promise that Lewis kept.

Mrs. Moore wrote to Albert Lewis months later, after she finally learned of her son’s death: “They tell me he was taken a prisoner, overthrew his guards, got back to our lines to be sent over again . . . was shot through the head and killed instantaneously,” she wrote. “I had built up such hopes on my only son, and they are buried with so many others in that wretched Somme.”55

Albert Lewis was especially anxious about his own son’s situation; he had hoped, in vain, to get Lewis reassigned to safer duty on the front. On April 8, Lewis dashed off a note to tell his father he was safe. “We have had a fairly rough time, though we were not really in the thick of it,” he wrote. “I have lost one or two of my best friends and in particular a fellow called Perrett who used to be at Malvern, and who got a bit in the eye.”⁵⁶ Frank Winter Perrett was in the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry when he was wounded on March 29. He survived his injuries.

On April 14, the Somerset Light Infantry began their own assault on the German-held village of Riez du Vinage, near Arras. Knowledge of a previous battle must have been on their minds. Almost exactly a year earlier, in April 1917, the Allies had staged a large offensive, the Battle of Arras, which drew troops from the four corners of the British Empire.⁵⁷ It was to be “the knockout blow” on the Western Front. Instead, it was an ambiguous bloodbath. When the assault was finally called off, it had cost the British and French 450,000 casualties, dead and wounded.

A year later, Britain’s military leadership was no less determined to fight the German foe to the death. It was widely believed that a German victory on the Western Front now would be the end of the Allied cause. Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces in Europe, had just issued the order: “Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each man must fight to the end.”58

At 6:30 p.m., as British artillery laid down a barrage, the Somerset Light Infantry went into action. They met intense machine-gun fire. “Owing to the accuracy of this fire,” according to the battalion report, “the advance was temporarily held up.”⁵⁹ In fact, a number of men were cut down, but the battalion continued to advance. Lewis would recall The Iliad when he sought to describe the experience of coming under fire: “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about.”⁶⁰ By 7:15 p.m., the assault was successful. Lewis safely reached the village, now in British hands, and received about sixty German prisoners.

A MAN OF CONSCIENCE

Nevertheless there were casualties, including Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, struck by machine-gun fire and dead the next day. He was twenty years old. Johnson had joined the army at about the same time as Lewis. The two met during military training at Oxford and found they had much in common. Both planned to take up their scholarship, their love of the classics, after the war. Both enjoyed debating the big questions about God, philosophy, and morality. Thrust into combat together, they found time to talk during lulls in the fighting.

“I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there,” Lewis wrote soon after learning of his death. “I had him so often in my thoughts. . . . I can hardly believe he is dead.”61 Reflecting years later, Lewis declared that Johnson “would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed.” He even viewed Johnson’s arrival in his battalion as a providential challenge to his atheism—“in my own battalion also I was assailed”—and a vital part of his eventual conversion to Christianity.⁶² “In him I found dialectical sharpness such as I had hitherto known only in Kirk [Kirkpatrick], but coupled with youth and whim and poetry. He was moving toward Theism and we had endless arguments on that and every other topic whenever we were out of the line.”⁶³

Yet there was much more to Johnson that so deeply impressed Lewis beyond his debating skills: a quality of character that he had rarely encountered among his academic peers. Johnson possessed an unimpeachable integrity—a coherent moral code—that caught Lewis completely off guard: “The important thing was that he was a man of conscience. I had hardly till now encountered principles in anyone so nearly my own age and my own sort. The alarming thing was that he took them for granted. It crossed my mind for the first time since my apostasy that the severer virtues might have some relevance to one’s own life.”⁶⁴

We cannot know exactly how Johnson’s commitment to these “severer virtues” influenced Lewis in his journey toward Christian faith. But we know that he found it compelling—“I accepted his principles at once”—and that he was somewhat embarrassed by his own “unexamined life.” Lewis would have to reckon with Johnson’s principles, with the severity of the moral universe envisioned in the Bible, before his conversion could occur.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, the assault at Riez du Vinage was still in play. The next morning, on April 15, the Germans counterattacked by bombing the village. The British returned fire. A shell—probably fired from behind the British line—went off close to Lewis, killing Sergeant Harry Ayres. His death was a great loss to Lewis: the sergeant had treated him with unusual respect and compassion and “became to me almost like a father.”66

Shrapnel from the same mortar struck Lewis in the hand, leg, and chest. A stretcher crew picked him up and took him to No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital, near Étaples. His brother, also deployed in France, borrowed a motorbike and rushed over to see him.

With no life-threatening injuries, Lewis was sent home to England to make a full recovery. “Thank God Jacks has come through it safely,” Warnie wrote in his journal, “and that nightmare is now lifted from my mind.”⁶⁷ Lewis learned that the fragment in his chest was too close to his heart to be removed; it would have to stay. “They will leave it there,” he wrote, “and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.”⁶⁸ Lewis would not rejoin his battalion before the war ended; his soldiering days were done.

“My life is rapidly becoming divided into two periods,” he wrote, “one including all the time before we got into the battle of Arras, the other since.”⁶⁹ From a hospital bed in Bristol, Lewis now struggled to come to terms with the face of war: the shattered limbs and shattered minds, the men who never returned, the randomness of death. In addition to Moore and Johnson, most of the remainder of his friends would die in battle in the last year of the war: Alexander Gordon Sutton, killed January 2; Thomas Kerrison Davy, who died of his wounds on March 29; and Martin Ashworth Somerville, killed in Palestine on September 21. “I could sit down and cry over the whole business: and yet of course we have both much to be thankful for,” he wrote his father. “If I had not been wounded when I was, I should have gone through a terrible time. Nearly all my friends in the Battalion are gone.”70

A GLIMPSE OF NARNIA

What Lewis and Tolkien and the fighting men of their generation endured was something novel in the history of warfare: modern science and technology ruthlessly devoted to the annihilation of both man and nature. Only a handful of statesmen openly worried about the infatuation with material and scientific advancement. Winston Churchill was one of them. “Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes life majestic and tolerable,” he wrote. “There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life.”⁷¹

Lewis and Tolkien would use their literary gifts to contribute mightily to this task: the “confident expression” of human dignity in cultural life. At the same time, the abuse of science—its capacity to dehumanize its masters as well as its victims—would also be a major theme of their works. Rather than liberating human beings from their ancient frailties, science enslaved them. The dystopian world in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, for example, is dominated by an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., a cover for supernatural and sinister purposes. “There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall,” Lewis wrote. “If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate.”⁷²

Like Tolkien, the experience of war cut in two directions for Lewis. He could never quite forget its depredations: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [high explosive], 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 till they seemed to grow to your feet . . .”73 And yet, as we’ll see, the sorrows of war did not ultimately blacken Lewis’s creative life. The world of Narnia, a land watered by streams of joy—“the land I have been looking for all my life”—would emerge from the wreckage of a Great War.

Perhaps something like Narnia became visible during a journey to a hospital in London, where Lewis was sent to recover from his wounds. It seems likely that the simple pleasure of a train ride through the English countryside, set against the dreariness and horror of war, created for Lewis a powerful experience of joy: a sensation so compelling that it undermined his materialist outlook. As he wrote from his bed at Endsleigh Palace Hospital:

Can you imagine how I enjoyed my journey to London? First of all the sight and smell of the sea, that I have missed for so many long and weary months, and then the beautiful green country seen from the train. . . . I think I never enjoyed anything so much as that scenery—all the white in the hedges, and the fields so full of buttercups that in the distance they seemed to be of solid gold.⁷⁴

The experience appears to have wrought a change in Lewis—a small change, perhaps, but a permanent one. It quickened his belief in a spiritual, otherworldly source of natural beauty. “You see the conviction is gaining ground on me that after all Spirit does exist,” he wrote. “I fancy that there is Something right outside time & place, which did not create matter, as the Christians say, but is matter’s great enemy: and that Beauty is the call of the spirit in that something to the spirit in us. You see how frankly I admit that my views have changed.”75

Something “outside time and place” had stirred him. Perhaps the stirring began with George MacDonald and Phantastes, the book Lewis discovered during the war. This story of the human longing for beauty in the midst of sorrow and death would, in some respects, anticipate Lewis’s own quest. “She smiled when she saw that my eyes were open,” wrote MacDonald. “I asked her whether it was day yet. She answered, ‘It is always day here, so long as I keep my fire burning.’ I felt wonderfully refreshed; and a great desire to see more of the island awoke within me.”⁷⁶