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

Nevertheless there were casualties, including Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, struck by machine-gun fire and dead the next day. He was twenty years old. Johnson had joined the army at about the same time as Lewis. The two met during military training at Oxford and found they had much in common. Both planned to take up their scholarship, their love of the classics, after the war. Both enjoyed debating the big questions about God, philosophy, and morality. Thrust into combat together, they found time to talk during lulls in the fighting. “I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there,” Lewis wrote soon after learning of his death. “I had him so often in my thoughts. . . . I can hardly believe he is dead.”61 Reflecting years later, Lewis declared that Johnson “would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed.” He even viewed Johnson’s arrival in his battalion as a providential challenge to his atheism—“in my own battalion also I was assailed”—and a vital part of his eventual conversion to Christianity.