More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 18 - October 20, 2020
“The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them.” — Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 “Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the
...more
“Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuver,” Churchill once observed. “The greater the general, the more he contributes to manoeuver, the less he demands in slaughter.”12 The generals of this war demanded much in slaughter. By the time of the Armistice, more than nine million soldiers lay dead and roughly thirty-seven million wounded. On average, there were about 6,046 men killed every day of the war, a war that lasted 1,566 days. In Great Britain, almost six million men—a quarter of Britain’s adult male population—passed through the ranks of the army. About one in eight perished.13
“Take my advice,” says Mr. Beaver, “whenever you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”22
“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”24
Tolkien and Lewis offer an understanding of the human story that is both tragic and hopeful: they suggest that war is a symptom of the ruin and wreckage of human life, but that it points the way to a life restored and transformed by grace.
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all,” he explains. “But I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”31
“I have frequently been astonished to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war,” he says. Such a conflict, he warns, would end “in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.”1
Science fiction writer H. G. Wells recalled the mood: “I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation—in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilized world—thought that war was dying out. So it seemed to us.”7
Both authors regarded twentieth-century modernization as a threat to human societies because they viewed the natural world as the handiwork of God and thus integral to human happiness. As such, nature was an essential ally in the struggle against these dehumanizing forces.
What a regimental historian said of the Battle of the Somme could be applied to many of the battles from 1914–18 that defaced the European landscape: “In that field of fire nothing could live.”
Vera Brittain described the scene near Amiens, as she drove to find the grave of her fiancé. She witnessed “a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man.”29
“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”53
Incredibly, forced sterilization—considered cheap, safe, and permanent—became the stated goal of the eugenics movement. Beginning in 1907, states such as Indiana passed sterilization laws “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” The United States acquired the noxious distinction of being the first nation in the West to legalize compulsory sterilization.54
Indeed, a vital theme throughout is the sacred worth of the individual soul; in Middle-earth and in Narnia, every life is of immense consequence. On the other hand, their characters are deeply flawed individuals, capable of great evil, and in desperate need of divine grace to overcome their predicament. Both authors thus reflect the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.
Almost immediately the war was described “like a colossal machine, chewing up men and munitions like so much raw material.”67
“Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”1
“The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars,” writes Peter Wilson in The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. “Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries.”2
The nation-state was replacing religion as a powerful source of meaning and identity in people’s lives. “Nationalism effortlessly incorporated some of the major themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” writes Michael Burleigh in Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. This included “the belief that a people had been chosen to fulfill a providential purpose.”25
The concept of America as an exceptional nation is as old as the republic, and older still. Ever since John Winthrop and his band of Puritans landed at Massachusetts Bay in 1630, Americans have thought of themselves as pilgrims on a divine “errand in the wilderness,” destined to establish a holy commonwealth and “a city on a hill.”
Paul Bull, a minister and former chaplain, spoke for many of them: “The Age of Progress ends in a barbarism such as shocks a savage. The Age of Reason ends in a delirium of madness.”67
For let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love.87
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
...more
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.”
“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
George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance,
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.”
“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.
Historians estimate that perhaps a third of all Allied casualties on the Western Front occurred in the trenches, either from enemy fire or disease.
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
“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
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 encountered quite a number of them at Oxford, and was disdainful: “I think we have now arrived at the point where a wise man can do no more than wait for the end with what grace he can,” he wrote in August 1920. “And it is hard to summon much grace if you meet as many traitors and cranks in our own class as I do here, hankering for the blessing of Soviet rule at once.”35
“For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.”37
“There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth,” Tolkien explained many years later. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’ ”92 The mythmaker, fired by the sense of exile and the desire to return to his authentic home, reflects “a splintered fragment of the true light.”93
As we will see, it is their moral imagination that exerts a unique power: the proposition that every person is caught up in an epic contest between Light and Darkness. In the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis, the choices of the weak matter as much as those of the mighty.
Thucydides recorded the scene thus: No one was prepared to persevere in what had once been thought the path of honor, as they could well be dead before that destination was reached. Immediate pleasure, and any means profitable to that end, became the new honor and the new value. No fear of god or human law was any constraint. Pious or impious made
no difference in their view, when they could see all dying without distinction.2
The German artist Otto Dix survived combat in Champagne, the Somme, and Russia, but it changed him. “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is,” he wrote. “It is the work of the devil.”11
Thus, set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will.33
Indeed, a bedrock belief in evil, and in the responsibility to resist it, gives the writings of Tolkien and Lewis their dignity and power. It is the reason their stories, so fantastical in style, seem to speak into our present reality. The war against evil is the moral landscape of our mortal lives: a journey of souls degraded or redeemed, dragged into the Darkness of self or led into the Light of grace.
Sam’s loyalty is tested from beginning to end, from the decision to leave the Shire to the final approach to Mordor. “It is going to be very dangerous, Sam. It is already dangerous,” warns Frodo. “Most likely neither of us will come back.” Sam doesn’t flinch: “If you don’t come back, sir, then I shan’t, that’s certain. ‘Don’t you leave him!’ they said to me. ‘Leave him!’ I said. ‘I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they’ll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with.’
Poet Thomas Hardy, writing upon the signing of the Armistice, undoubtedly spoke for many: Some could, some could not, shake off misery; The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!” And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”2
