A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

by Joseph Loconte

no creatures are born for captivity, and none have a birthright to oppress others.

“Indeed many viewed the prospect of a general war as cathartic and cleansing. War would renew each nation’s sense of purpose while liberating factory workers, farmers, office clerks, and students from their dull workaday activities, the complacency of bourgeois existence.”68 Instead, the war would last longer, and be fought with greater savagery, than anyone dared to imagine.

Westphalia set a new political foundation for the West, based on the sovereignty of the state, the right of non-interference in internal (religious) affairs, and the idea of international law to settle disputes. Pope Innocent X rejected Westphalia for limiting the authority of the Church, calling the treaty “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”

“Christ died on Good Friday for Freedom, Honor and Chivalry, and our boys are dying for the same things . . . MOBILIZE THE NATION FOR A HOLY WAR!”

He remarked wryly to his father that one of the most serious consequences of the war was the survival of those least fit for survival. “All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are moral and physical weeds—a fact which does not promise favorably for the next generation.”

Fidelity to God demanded fidelity to one’s country as God’s instrument, especially in wartime. Cross and Crown must be kept together.

“The key to the whole thing,” wrote Theodore Hardy, a chaplain who later won the Victoria Cross, was for ministers to serve in the combat zone: “If you stay back, you are wasting your time. Men will forgive anything but lack of courage.”

“It is Nice in the Surf but What About the Men in the Trenches? Go and Help.”

In the years after the conflict, the cruelty and senselessness of the war—of any war for any reason—became the dominant motifs of a generation. The writings of authors such as Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), T. S. Eliot (The Hollow Men), and Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) reinforced these themes in the public mind.

“The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it,” he wrote. “But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.”

The last soldier to die in the Great War was an American, twenty-three-year-old Henry Gunther, a private with the American Expeditionary Force in France. He was killed at 10:59 a.m., November 11, 1918, one minute before the Armistice went into effect. Gunther’s squad, part of the 79th Infantry Division, encountered a roadblock of German machine guns near the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers. Against the orders of his sergeant, he charged the guns with his bayonet. German soldiers, aware of the Armistice, tried to wave him off. But Gunther kept coming and was gunned down; he died instantly. His divisional record states: “Almost as he fell, the gunfire died away and an appalling silence prevailed.”