Both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis endured the trenches of World War I and we...

Both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis endured the trenches of World War I and were scarred with memories that show up in their fiction.

Tolkien's depiction of the Dead Marshes in LOTR reflects his experience of No Man's Land, sodden wastes littered with corpses. In THE LAST BATTLE, Lewis depicts a band of unicorns being shot down before they even reached the battlefield, a common occurrence in WWI when "Tommies" were mowed down by machine gun fire as soon as they emerged from the protection of the trenches, before they even had a chance to raise their rifles.