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
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