C. S. Lewis might well have taken the path of other war authors and embraced the genre of irony and doubt. His earliest war writings suggest he was well on his way. Lewis’s first published work, called “Death in Battle,” appeared in Reveille magazine in 1919. The poem describes “the brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown / into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own.”69 The work appeared in the same issue containing poems by Sassoon and Graves. In the same year Lewis published a collection of poems, written from 1915–1918, titled Spirits in Bondage. They embody an
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