Although both men read and enjoyed stories about war, about armies clashing in a great moral contest, they did not think of themselves as “holy crusaders” when the First World War got underway. Tolkien did not get swept up in the war fever of 1914. When tens of thousands of young men volunteered for service in the British Expeditionary Force, he continued his studies. In August 1916, shortly after being deployed to France, Tolkien experienced the “universal weariness” of war and the “bitter disillusionment” of discovering that his military training had not prepared him for the conditions of
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