It is often said that Tolkien wrote the first stories of his mythology in the trenches. ‘That’s all spoof,’ he cautioned fifty years after the event. ‘You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that’s all. You couldn’t write…You’d be crouching down among flies and filth.’ After rejoining his battalion, he made revisions to ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ during two days in a dugout in the Thiepval Wood front line; but none of the ‘Lost Tales’ that form the basis for the much later ‘Silmarillion’ can be dated from Tolkien’s time in France, let alone from the trenches themselves. The first problem was finding the requisite concentration; then there was the strong risk of losing anything you had actually written. Rob Gilson had declared from the trenches: ‘Some people talk of reading books here, but I don’t understand how they can manage it.’ The voracious G. B. Smith managed to consume a great many books while in France, but after the loss of his long poem ‘The Burial of Sophocles’ en route from England he was constantly concerned to send home anything he wrote. When he received Tolkien’s ‘The Lonely Isle’, he had made a copy of that too and sent it back to West Bromwich for safekeeping. Composing a sustained narrative was impossible amid the strain and interruptions of trench life. Picturing the elms of Warwick must have been challenge enough, for Thiepval Wood was far from tranquil. Edmund Blunden spoke of its ‘ghastly gallows-trees’, while Charles Douie wrote in his war memoir, The Weary Road, ‘The wood was never silent, for shell and rifle fire echoed endlessly through the trees, in testimony of the unceasing vigil of the opposing lines. At night the flares, as they rose and fell, threw the wood into deeper shadow and made it yet more dark and menacing.’
Elsewhere Tolkien did recall writing some of the mythology ‘down in dugouts under shell fire’, but it can have been little more than jotted ideas, outlines, or names. The anxieties of war, however, stoked the creative fires. His mind wandered through the world that had started to evolve at Oxford and in the training camps, in his lexicon, and in his poems. As he later reflected, ‘I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even “sleeping”.’ He was conscious, in retrospect at least, that such activity constituted a minor dereliction of duty, and confessed guiltily, ‘It did not make for efficiency and present-mindedness, of course, and I was not a good officer…’
On the Western Front the present, for all its urgent terror, could not obscure the lamentable wreckage of the past all around, and even the recent past might seem bizarrely ancient. ‘The Old British Line,’ Edmund Blunden observed, ‘was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is an obstinate remoteness about a skull.’ Tolkien never merely observed the past. He recreated it in his own wayward imagination, focusing not on Troy but on Kortirion and, by now perhaps, on the great city of Gondolin too.
Some of those old bones protruding from the trench walls on the northern edge of Thiepval Wood were the relics, it may be, of men known to G. B. Smith when he first carried ‘Kortirion’ around these same trenches ‘like a treasure’ and headed off on night patrol exhorting Tolkien to publish. The line here had scarcely moved since Smith’s winter vigil, but as Tolkien arrived the day after his signalling course ended, Thursday 24 August 1916, a mile away the Germans finally relinquished most of the Leipzig Salient, the fortification that had defeated the Salford Pals on 1 July. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers let off smoke barrages in support of the attack (by battalions of Tolkien’s division), drawing artillery fire from the Germans. The next two days poured with rain.
Relief on Friday took nearly five hours: not until the incoming battalion had filed in with all its gear and settled down could the Fusiliers squeeze past and stumble out into the dark trees. The process was ‘always long and a trial to the temper’, Gilson had written, but ‘the joy of getting out of the trenches is quite indescribable…The removal of the strain of responsibility, though it be only partial, is like a great load off the mind.’ They reached Bouzincourt at 1.30 in the morning on Sunday 27 August – only to be sent back to the front line after less than twenty-eight hours’ respite, as Tolkien noted punctiliously, at the crack of dawn on Monday.
But now he was on the other side of the old No Man’s Land, east of the Leipzig Salient in trenches that had been seized just hours before. His new home was strewn with the bodies of dead German soldiers. In the dugouts were prisoners, many of them wounded. It was, in the words of the chaplain, Evers, ‘an appalling bit of line…no better than a hen-run, with precious little protection’. They were under shellfire, and to make a thoroughly miserable situation worse, the rain returned with a vengeance, turning the ground underfoot to a grey glue on the Tuesday. ‘I feel that if I survive this war the only classification of weather that will ever matter to me will be into dry and muddy,’ Rob Gilson had written in March. ‘I could almost cry sometimes at the universal mud and the utter impossibility of escaping from it…’ As the summer passed away, the Somme began to revert to that primeval ooze. The men, though, had at their command an ‘extraordinary cheeriness’, as Evers said: ‘If one got at all down the cure was to go and visit the men in a dug-out; the worse the conditions the cheerier they were and one came away cheered up oneself.’
On Friday 1 September, Tolkien moved back to relief trenches around the charnel-house of Ovillers, and he did not reach his bivouac at Bouzincourt until the following Tuesday night.
Aside from its wine, which he liked, France can have given Tolkien small compensation for the miseries of war. He disliked the native language and detested French cooking. On his sole previous visit, in the summer of 1913 as tutor to two Mexican boys, his warm impressions of Paris had been marred by ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and the spitting and the indecency’ of the Frenchmen in the streets, and he had been glad to leave for Celtic Brittany; but the trip had ended with one of the boys’ aunts being run over by a car and fatally injured before Tolkien’s eyes. If history had placed him in Saxony, defending the Weser against marauding Frenchmen, as the Lancashire Fusiliers had done in 1759, doubtless he would have been happier.
Yet Humphrey Carpenter, describing this attitude as ‘Gallophobia’, surely pays too much attention to mischievous hyperbole (as he does regarding Tolkien’s views on Shakespeare and Wagner). Later, Tolkien’s knowledge of French extended to the niceties of dialectal Eastern Walloon pronunciation, according to his protégé and friend, Simonne d’Ardenne. Certainly, he felt a lingering attachment towards the region of France in which he served. In 1945 he wrote, ‘I can see clearly now in my mind’s eye the old trenches and the squalid houses and the long roads of Artois, and I would visit them again if I could.’* It is a nostalgia not for remembered happiness but for a lost intimacy, even with horror, drudgery, and ugliness.
For five mostly dry days in the second week of September 1916, the 25th Division clogged the long roads with its dusty columns of troops and horses and its lumbering lines of support vehicles as it hauled its serpentine bulk west. Tolkien was at last granted a respite after two months of fighting and trench-duty. Many officers made such journeys on horseback; but, as it turned out, when he was in France he walked everywhere: ‘endless marching, always on foot,’ as his children recalled him saying, ‘sometimes carrying the men’s equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going’.
At Franqueville, midway between the Western Front and the Atlantic, the division rested and trained from 12 September. By the end of the fortnight Tolkien had at his disposal six men freshly trained in visual signals. More importantly, he had been reunited with an old friend from Cannock Chase.
This was Leslie Risdon Huxtable. Raised in Tiverton, Devon, and nearly three years younger than Tolkien, he had thrown in his undergraduate studies at Cambridge to enlist, with his heart set on a rifle regiment. Instead he had been posted, within two weeks of the similarly disappointed Tolkien, for training with the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers. From Cannock Chase, Second Lieutenant Huxtable had made two trips to Otley in Yorkshire for signals training, and now (as it seems) he had been summoned to act as Tolkien’s understudy, ready to take over as battalion signals officer should Tolkien be put out of action. He arrived at the right time: Tolkien had been at the sharp end of a disagreement with a superior. (‘I am intensely sorry to hear of your frictions with others,’ Smith wrote. ‘I know how one officer can make a beast of himself to his junior, if he is swine enough to do so.’ The battalion was temporarily in the hands of the twenty-year-old Captain Metcalfe, Bird having gone on leave for ten days.) ‘Hux’, as Tolkien called him, joined him in ‘A’ Company, and when the Fusiliers arrived back at Hédauville near the Somme front, on 26 September, the two shared a tent. During their time at rest, momentous and fateful events had transpired on the battlefield.
In 1945, Tolkien described the Second World War as ‘the first War of the Machines’, noting that its close left ‘everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines’. By contrast, the conflict of 1914-18 was a war of manpower against machines, of the old world against the new. By September 1916, the battle of the Somme had become, like the siege of Verdun, a ghastly and almost fruitless exercise in attrition. A major breakthrough by infantry advancing against the entrenched machine guns now seemed inconceivable, so instead the primary goal was to kill as many Germans as possible. Such vast squandering of young lives left an indelible mark on Tolkien’s generation, who refused to commit their own sons to similar static bloodbaths in the next war. More often they put the machines in charge – the Flying Fortress, the doodlebug, the aircraft carrier, the A-bomb – pitting them against each other, or against civilians. But the tide of history turned at the Somme, with the advent of the tank.
Rumour was dominated by this new wire-crushing, trench-bridging, bullet-proof monster. It had been deployed by surprise on 15 September, and the third ‘big push’ of the Somme offensive had swept the Germans back until the line ran for five miles due eastward from Thiepval. Over this ruinous shambles, once a pretty red-tiled village, the Fusiliers returning from the west could see the artillery blaze day and night. When they arrived back in Thiepval Wood, on Wednesday 27 September, the village had all but fallen. Some of its garrison had fought to the death; others had surrendered when a tank lumbered into view.
The wood had suffered in the attack: since Tolkien’s last visit it had become a wilderness of toppled trunks and black stumps, hung with rags of bark. Battalion headquarters was now in a frontline trench north of the trees, so that Bird, the commanding officer, could see what was going on: here Tolkien had eight runners. The trench gave a vivid view on Thursday afternoon as waves of troops swept on from Thiepval in the first major attack on the Schwaben Redoubt.*
Late in the day the assault force sent a warning that Germans were making a getaway down the trenches opposite, which ran west to the Ancre. Ordered to head them off, three groups of Fusiliers made to dash across No Man’s Land and through a weak point in the wire. A machine gun started up, cutting down several men before the rest were told to hang back, but the first patrol was in the enemy trench and forcing a passage with grenades. They killed the machine gunners and the raid captured the Pope’s Nose, a jocularly named but lethal salient in the enemy line. Throughout the night one of Tolkien’s lance-corporals, thrown on his wits after a shell shattered his lamp, flashed his messages back across No Man’s Land using a salvaged German torch. More than thirty prisoners had been taken; Tolkien, speaking German, offered a drink of water to a wounded captive officer, who corrected him on his pronunciation. Ironically, some of the captives belonged to a Saxon regiment that had fought side-by-side with the Lancashire Fusiliers at the Battle of Minden. But they were lucky to be alive: the Fusiliers had been told only days before that when ‘cleaning up’ a captured trench, ‘If guards [are] insufficient, prisoners are often treacherous – so at times prisoners cannot be made.’
The captain who had led the Fusiliers’ raid fell with a sniper’s bullet through his head the next morning as he was returning to his own trench after delivering several more prisoners. Rain, mist, and smoke obscured visual signals all that day. Tolkien had a miraculous addition to his equipment, a new portable Morse telegraph set that could be used freely, unlike the conventional field telephone, because it did not leak its signal via the earth for all to hear. The ‘Fullerphone’, though, was a rather complicated array,* and in any case the line back through the wood was cut repeatedly by heavy shellfire.
The shells, of course, also found more grievous targets. Before the raid, ‘A’ Company had been threading its way through the trenches in the wood towards the front line when the leading subaltern, Rowson, stopped for a chat with the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bird (now back from leave). Huxtable, bringing up the rear, heard their voices, but shortly afterwards a message came down from the head of the column saying it was leaderless. A private who had been with Rowson described how they had just left the CO when a shell had burst between them: ‘I was blown up in the air without a wound in me…Directly I recovered myself from being covered with dirt I looked for the officer, he was no where to be seen.’ The shell had simply annihilated Rowson.
About the same time, Tolkien was passed a letter from the wife of a signaller, Private Sydney Sumner. ‘I have not heard from him for this long time but we have had news from the army chaplain that he has been missing since July the 9th,’ she wrote. ‘Dear Sir I would not care if I only knew how he went. I know they cannot all be saved to come home…’ Replying to such pitiable letters (Sumner had left a one-year-old daughter too) was one of the hardest tasks a sensitive officer faced; Tolkien preserved several of them.
Not far from the lines that Tolkien’s battalion held late in September 1916 stands the Thiepval Memorial, inscribed with more than seventy thousand names. Many of these belong to unidentified bodies buried under the simple white stones in 242 cemeteries dotting the rural landscape of the Somme; the others belong to soldiers who, like Rowson, vanished without trace.*
After six days’ rest, mostly at Bouzincourt, where he again shared a tent with Huxtable, Tolkien was sent back into the line with the Fusiliers, and from now on he lived almost constantly in a dugout. The tanks had not, after all, brought the sweeping breakthrough planned for September, and the grapple for ever more desolate yards of mud went on as winter drew near. Now his battalion was sent in to the upland behind Thiepval, a mile or more from the old British front line: a wilderness that, though relatively unscarred by shellfire, was arduous to negotiate and remote from established supply lines. The signallers synchronized the battalion’s watches, and the Fusiliers were off, marching up the hill to Ovillers, past what had once been its church, and slogging onward into a maze of narrow trenches. Tolkien settled in on 6 October at battalion headquarters in front of the Ferme de Mouquet, unaffectionately known as Mucky Farm, a warren of fortified cellars that had finally been taken a week ago. (Its roofs could be seen sparkling from Blighty Wood when G. B. Smith and the Salford Pals had prepared to attack on 1 July; they had been given a map of the farm on the supposition that they would arrive there with their picks and shovels an hour and forty minutes after leaving the wood.)
The Fusiliers moved into a sequence of three trenches, with Huxtable and ‘A’ Company in the frontline Hessian Trench. Opposite lay the long Regina Trench, held by German Marines. To the right, and eastward, Regina Trench was under attack by Canadian troops. To the left, the endless rattle of gunfire and the crump of explosions marked the ongoing struggle for the Schwaben Redoubt. Ration parties leading mules repeatedly came under shellfire on the exposed brow of the land, where the trenches were barely worth the name. Ten men on a working party were killed this way returning from the front line, and the officer in charge succumbed to wounds the next day.
Now, less than a month after it began, Huxtable’s stay on the Somme came to a sudden close. A shell burst on the parados or rear wall of his trench on 10 October, bringing it down on top of him. He was freed, but splinters of shrapnel had shot through his leg and one shard remained embedded in the bone of his calf. Huxtable was packed off to the casualty clearing station and thence to England. He had gained what many soldiers craved, a Blighty wound; but Tolkien had lost a deputy and a companionable friend.
The same day ‘A’ Company and the others were pulled back to the reserve trenches between Mouquet Farm and the front line and set to work digging, as ever, to deepen, widen, and strengthen the trenches. They vacated Hessian Trench in the nick of time, for on Thursday 12 October the Germans counterattacked all along the line. The next day Tolkien and battalion headquarters moved forward to the Zollern Redoubt, five hundred yards to the rear of Hessian Trench. They were greeted that evening and through the night by tear gas shells, but on Saturday there was encouraging news: the Schwaben Redoubt had fallen. Two days later instructions came down from the generals that they now wanted Regina Trench.
The weather had held out well, apart from a single day’s downpour, but a white frost ushered in Monday 16 October. There was not much time before winter locked the infantry down. Possession of Regina Trench would afford the British a panoramic view across German-held roads, fields, and towns to the north. Prisoners had been interrogated, planes had flown reconnaissance missions. For the first time, Tolkien had been issued with a fresh set of coded unit designations to confuse German intelligence. On Tuesday the Fusiliers, now numbering less than four hundred, descended from the plateau to rehearse for the attack in a safe area at Ovillers Post, just behind the old British front line west of Ovillers village. The four-mile trudge up the trenches to the front line began after dark on Wednesday 18 October 1916.
It was G. B. Smith’s twenty-second birthday. He had outlived his worst apprehensions, but a darkening of mood was apparent in his letters. After the August reunion he had spoken of the pleasure of re-reading the Mabinogion and warned Tolkien that his title of ‘Raconteur of the TCBS’ was under threat from Christopher Wiseman (who had sent tales of ‘his discovery of Brazilian Beetle Bangles in the wilds of Cumberland’). But soon Smith was mourning his own lost capacity for lunacy; he felt burdened with regrets and responsibilities. ‘Perhaps this note of regret would be drowned did I feel that I was now doing things that are in any way worth doing,’ he wrote. ‘Yes, I think it is sheer vacancy which is destroying me.’ His letters dwindled to little more than notes pleading for some word from his friend, or craving escape. ‘Thoughts of leave are already beginning to play about my leaden brows. Roll on! as they say in Lancashire. Twice I have dreamed of it: surely after the third time it will come to pass.’ For Tolkien, too, leave was always tantalizingly just around the corner, but his ordeal was now more acute than Smith’s. If August had been ‘universal weariness’, October must have been near exhaustion. ‘There were times when the constant deprivation of sleep drove men almost out of their mind,’ recalled Charles Douie. With mud and slush everywhere and winds blowing ever chillier, others were ‘astonished that flesh and blood can stand this sort of thing’.
Zero hour for the attack by Tolkien’s battalion on the German-held Regina Trench was set for just after midday on Thursday, 19 October 1916; but, having at last deposited themselves in Hessian Trench with their load of bombs and sandbags at four o’clock in the morning, the Fusiliers had to turn around and go back to Ovillers Post. Heavy rain on Wednesday, and torrents still falling through Thursday morning, had made a morass of the upland. No Man’s Land would be an impassable slough. Telegraph lines had gone down and the foul weather precluded visual signals. The assault was postponed for forty-eight hours. Three patrols, however, ventured out to check that the enemy’s wire had been cut. This time it had: so effectively that one patrol passed through unawares and another actually climbed into Regina Trench before fleeing under a hail of bombs.
On Saturday morning, 21 October, Tolkien was ensconced once more with his equipment and runners in a dugout where Hessian Trench came closest to the enemy line, which lay a furlong downhill, out of sight beyond a bulge of ground. The rain clouds had blown away under a strong, icy wind. The mercury had fallen to its lowest since the Big Push began, and a sharp frost had paralysed that other enemy, the mud. Tolkien and the others in headquarters were given a hot meal, as were the men squatting and standing along three miles of frozen trench: the Fusiliers, the three battalions to their right, and the five to their left. All was as quiet as the front line could ever be, though way off to the west fighting could be heard around the Schwaben Redoubt.
Six minutes after midday the heavy guns and howitzers launched the cannonade. The first two companies of Fusiliers climbed out into the noise and smoke, followed quickly by the second wave: ‘A’ Company with their picks and shovels strapped to their backs, flanked by the battalion bombers. Tolkien’s signallers went last, with the third wave, accompanied by men hauling machine guns and heavy trench mortars. Abruptly, the crowded, narrow trench was almost empty, and the Fusiliers were vanishing over the whale’s back of No Man’s Land towards the curtain of shells falling before Regina Trench. Evers, the padre, followed with the stretcher bearers. After a minute and a half the artillery barrage crept further away to fall directly on Regina Trench opposite Tolkien’s headquarters.
Another two and a half minutes, and explosions abruptly shook Hessian itself: the big German guns had woken up. By now the trench was filled with men of the Royal Irish Rifles, who had moved forward from their support position. Flares went up on the far side of No Man’s Land, but not the red flares the Fusiliers had taken to signal their positions. The minutes ticked by. Over to the left an enemy machine gun chattered.
Then figures came tumbling in over the parapet. They wore enemy field grey, but they were desperate, defeated men. At 12.20 p.m., Tolkien told brigade headquarters that Hessian Trench had begun to receive its first German prisoners.
The demoralized men of the 73rd and 74th Landwehr had been taken by surprise when the Fusiliers reached Regina Trench. Many had not got up from the ‘funk-holes’ gouged into the chalky walls in which they slept, and they had been caught still wrapped in groundsheets against the piercing cold. The distress flares had gone up, but most of the Germans had surrendered and were sent back across No Man’s Land, through their own retaliatory bombardment. Now the Royal Irish were marching the prisoners at gunpoint out of Hessian Trench, towards the divisional cage.
Directly opposite battalion headquarters a tiny group of defenders held out for a while but then joined the mass surrender. Over to the right, bursts of rifle fire and grenade explosions indicated a more stubborn pocket of resistance. Signallers flashed across a request for more grenades to be sent over and the Royal Irish started carrying them across. Finally, the fifteen or so ragged survivors of this last German stand were also back in Hessian Trench. The other half had been killed by the Fusiliers: bombed or bayoneted, or machine-gunned from their own parapet.
News filtered back from the battle fitfully. One of Tolkien’s runners who brought messages through the German bombardment was later decorated for bravery. The signaller hauling the battalion’s pigeon basket across No Man’s Land was hit, though another man rescued the basket and released a pigeon from Regina Trench with news of victory for divisional headquarters. The Fusiliers set up their red flags there and at 1.12 p.m. Tolkien sent a message to brigade headquarters that they had won the objective and joined up with the Loyal North Lancashires to their left. At 1.55 p.m. he reported that they had linked up with the unit to their right, too. Through the afternoon the other battalions won through, and Tolkien’s division alone took more than seven hundred prisoners. Regina Trench was littered with the bodies of those who had not surrendered.
In No Man’s Land lay fallen Fusiliers, most of them hit by their own artillery as they tried to keep close to the ‘creeping barrage’; Captain Metcalfe and the other company leader in the first wave had both been wounded before reaching the enemy line. Forty-one Lancashire Fusiliers were dead or missing. Evers, the padre, tended to many of the 117 wounded. ‘Some had the will to live and others hadn’t,’ he said. ‘I remember going up to one with whom I could find nothing very serious and telling him that I would return shortly with a stretcher party, to find when I had done so that he had passed out. Others that really were badly knocked about retained their courage and were carried back to safety.’ Evers finally walked back into Hessian Trench the next day, covered in blood and astonished to be greeted by a cheering battalion. He had been out all the bitterly cold night under shellfire. Later he wrote, ‘There is a war picture depicting a shadowy Christ alongside an RAMC officer helping in a wounded man – well, I saw no such vision, but I was nonetheless conscious of His presence during those hours.’
The Fusiliers were relieved on Sunday, slowly and fearfully, as darkness fell and shells crumped around them. The officers from battalion headquarters rode out on horseback. On the way down to Ovillers Post they encountered several of the fabled tanks, crawling noisily up to the line. ‘The horses were thoroughly frightened,’ said a wounded officer riding with them. ‘Neither horses nor riders had ever seen, or heard, any tanks before.’
For Second Lieutenant Tolkien, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 25th Division, the Battle of the Somme was over; but comfort, ease, and safety seemed far away. They were being switched from the Fifth Army, which had commanded them on the Somme, to the Second Army, long associated with Ypres, a name of ill omen. Monday 23 October 1916 dawned misty and damp outside Tolkien’s tent in the camp between Albert and Bouzincourt: wet weather just in time for a series of parades. The 74th Brigade was inspected by its brigadier-general at Albert, then taken by bus ten miles west for inspection by the divisional major-general. At least there was a hut to sleep in that night. On Tuesday came a final route march, thirteen miles along liquid roads from Vadencourt to Beauval, where Tolkien had attended Mass on the way to Franqueville back in September. Since leaving Étaples in June, he had packed his kit and moved forty-five times. Now, for the first time in nearly a month, he slept not under canvas or in a hut or a hole, but under a proper roof, in Beauval’s Rue d’Épinelte.
On Wednesday 25 October Tolkien felt weak and unwell, but he did not report sick until after the Fusiliers had been inspected and thanked by General Gough of the Fifth Army and by Field-Marshal Haig, the British commander-in-chief. On Friday, a cold and showery day, he went to the medical officer with a temperature of 103.
He had trench fever, a gift of the inescapable lice that had bred in the seams of his clothes and fed on him, passing a bacterium, Rickettsia quintana, into his bloodstream. That could have happened anything from two weeks to a month ago. British soldiers typically blamed lice on the German trenches they had to occupy, perhaps with more justice than prejudice: soldiers close to defeat, after all, are likely to prove less fastidious than the incoming victors. Evers recounts a scene from the Somme that may feature Tolkien, unnamed, in the role of the signals officer: ‘On one occasion I spent the night with the Brigade Machine Gun Officer and the Signals Officer in one of the captured German dug-outs…We dossed down for the night in the hopes of getting some sleep, but it was not to be. We no sooner lay down than hordes of lice got up. So we went round to the Medical Officer, who was also in the dug-out with his equipment, and he gave us some ointment which he assured us would keep the little brutes away. We anointed ourselves all over with the stuff and again lay down in great hopes, but it was not to be, because instead of discouraging them it seemed to act like a kind of hors d’oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour.’
The medical corps of 1916, for all their heroic work, were not much more use against trench fever itself, which they labelled ‘pyrexia of unknown origin’. The symptoms – a sudden loss of strength and balance, often accompanied by a rash, headaches, and severe pain in the legs and back – were left to run their course through rest. In some few cases the persistent fever might lead to heart failure; but for Tolkien, Rickettsia quintana proved a life-saver.
The army was notoriously suspicious about any attempt to ‘cry off sick’, but there was no question about Tolkien’s condition. He left the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers exactly four months after he joined them, on Saturday 28 October 1916, and was transferred to an officers’ hospital a short distance from Beauval, at Gézaincourt. On Sunday he was taken on the ambulance train from Candas to Le Touquet, and a bed at the Duchess of Westmorland Hospital. That night the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers also left Candas by rail, Flanders-bound. Since his arrival the battalion had lost nearly six hundred men: four hundred and fifty of them wounded, sixty dead, and seventy-four missing. Only the drafts it had received during the same period had enabled the unit to continue. But Tolkien had survived whole in body, and for the time being he was safe.