News of these battles, of their ferocity and destructiveness, was in the air as twenty-four-year-old Tolkien disembarked on June 4, 1916. Trained as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, his preparation could hardly have equipped him for the realities that lay ahead. He seemed to sense as much, for he did not expect to return home alive. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien recalled. “Parting from my wife then . . . it was like a death.”
