Like Tolkien, the experience of war cut in two directions for Lewis. He could never quite forget its depredations: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [high explosive], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet . . .”73 And yet, as we’ll see, the sorrows of war did not ultimately blacken Lewis’s creative life. The world of Narnia, a land watered by streams of joy—“the land I have been looking for all my
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