EFFORTPOST THE AMERICAN TOLKIEN

I'm not saying Martin pretended to be a conscientious objector to avoid the draft, don't get me wrong on that, but there's a very different path they both took when it came to war, and ironically it's the guy who didn't write about pooping in the grass who knew first hand what a battlefield really is like.

The same goes for C.S. Lewis, who joined up as soon as he was legally old enough (again, under the heavy hinting of all around him that this was The Right Thing To Do):

>In spite of this I came into residence in the summer (Trinity) term of 1917; for the real object now was simply to enter the University Officers' Training Corps as my most promising route into the Army. ...I was less than a term at Univ when my papers came through and I enlisted; and the conditions made it a most abnormal term. Half the College had been converted into a hospital and was in the hands of the R.A.M.C. In the remaining portion lived a tiny community of undergraduates - two of us not yet of military age, two unfit, one a Sinn-Feiner who would not fight for England, and a few other oddments which I never quite placed. [Since Lewis was born in November 1898, he would not yet be eighteen years old then].

>I passed through the ordinary course of training (a mild affair in those days compared with that of the recent war) and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, the old XIIIth Foot. I arrived in the front line trenches on my nineteenth birthday (November 1917), saw most of my service in the villages before Arras - Fampoux and Monchy - and was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers, in April 1918.

>I am surprised that I did not dislike the Army more. It was, of course, detestable. But the words "of course" drew the sting. That is where it differed from Wyvern. One did not expect to like it. Nobody said you ought to like it. Nobody pretended to like it. Everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastly interruption of rational life. And that made all the difference.

>…Some time in the middle of that winter I had the good luck to fall sick with what the troops called "trench fever" and the doctors P.U.O. (Pyrexia, unknown origin) and was sent for a wholly delightful three weeks to hospital at Le Tréport. ...Now, as an alternative to the trenches, a bed and a book were "very heaven". The hospital was a converted hotel and we were two in a room. My first week was marred by the fact that one of the night nurses was conducting a furious love affair with my room-mate. I had too high a temperature to be embarrassed, but the human whisper is a very tedious and unmusical noise; especially at night. After that my fortune mended. The amorous man was sent elsewhere and replaced by a musical misogynist from Yorkshire, who on our second morning together said to me, "Eh, lad, if we make beds ourselves dom b----s [darn bitches] won't stay in room so long" (or words to that effect). Accordingly, we made our own beds every day, and every day when the two V.A.D.'s looked in they said, "Oh, they've made their beds! Aren't these two good?" and rewarded us with their brightest smiles. I think they attributed our action to gallantry.

>... I may add that I did not enjoy the short time I spent in the company he commanded. Wallie had a genuine passion for killing Germans and a complete disregard of his own or anyone else's safety. He was always striking out bright ideas at which the hair of us subalterns stood on end. Luckily he could be very easily dissuaded by any plausible argument that occurred to us. Such was his valour and innocence that he never for a moment suspected us of any but a military motive. He could never grasp the neighbourly principles which, by the tacit agreement of the troops, were held to govern trench-warfare, and to which I was introduced at once by my sergeant. I had suggested "pooping" a rifle grenade into a German post where we had seen heads moving. "Just as 'ee like, zir," said the sergeant, scratching his head, "but once 'ee start doing that kind of thing, 'ee'll get zummit back, zee?"

>I must not paint the war-time army all gold. ...The troop train from Rouen - that interminable, twelve-mile-an-hour train, in which no two coaches were alike - left at about ten in the evening. Three other officers and I were allotted a compartment. There was no heating; for light we brought our own candles; for sanitation there were the windows. The journey would last about fifteen hours. It was freezing hard. In the tunnel just outside Rouen (all my generation remember it) there was a sudden wrenching and grating noise and one of our doors dropped off bodily into the dark.

>…The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it. Until the great German attack came in the Spring we had a pretty quiet time. Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely "keeping us quiet" by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day. …Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. …But for the rest, the war--the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., 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--all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant. One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than the realities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard--so far from me that it "whined" like a journ*list's or a peace-time poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This is what Homer wrote about."

>The rest of my war experiences have little to do with this story. How I "took" about sixty prisoners - that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up-is not worth telling, save as a joke. Did not Falstaff "take" Sir Colville of the Dale? Nor does it concern the reader to know how I got a sound "Blighty" from an English shell ... Two things stand out. One is the moment, just after I had been hit, when I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death. I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either. The proposition "Here is a man dying" stood before my mind as dry, as factual, as unemotional as something in a text-book.

It's easy to congratulate yourself on being so much tougher-minded than men who really did get shot at and bombarded, while you're writing about a woman with a dose of the shits.