CHAPTER 3
1917–1918
The Vasty Fields of France: War
The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) once quipped that the best way of making sense of people is to find out what was happening in the world when they were twenty years old. A few weeks before 29 November 1918—the day that Lewis turned twenty—the Great War finally came to an end. Many felt guilty for surviving while their comrades had fallen. Those who served in trench warfare were permanently marked by the violence, destruction, and horrors they had experienced. Lewis’s twentieth year was shaped by his firsthand experience of armed conflict. He arrived in the trenches near Arras in northwestern France on his nineteenth birthday, and on his twentieth was still recuperating from the war wounds he had suffered.
The Curious Case of the Unimportant War
If Napoleon was right, Lewis’s world of thought and experience would have been irreparably and irreversibly shaped by war, trauma, and loss. We might therefore expect Lewis’s inner being to be deeply moulded by the impact of conflict and close brushes with death. Yet Lewis himself tells us otherwise. His experience of war was, he informs us, “in a way unimportant.” He seemed to view his experience at English boarding schools as much more unpleasant than the time he spent in the trenches of France.93
While Lewis served on the battlefields of France in 1917 and 1918, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare, Surprised by Joy makes only scant reference to it. Lewis clearly believed that his woes during his year at Malvern College were of greater importance than his entire wartime experience—and, even then, seems to prefer to concentrate his narrative on the books he read and people he met. The unspeakable suffering and devastation around him had been filtered out. It had, Lewis tells us, been more than adequately written about by other people; he had nothing to add to it.94 His voluminous later writings make little mention of the war.
Some readers will feel there is a certain sense of imbalance and disproportion here. Why did Lewis spend three chapters of Surprised by Joy detailing his relatively minor woes at Malvern College and pay so little attention to the vastly more significant violence, trauma, and horror of the Great War? This sense of imbalance is only reinforced by a reading of Lewis’s works as a whole, in which the Great War is largely passed over—or, when mentioned, is treated as something that happened to someone else. It is as if Lewis was seeking to distance or dissociate himself from his memories of conflict. Why?
The simplest explanation is also the most plausible: Lewis could not bear to remember the trauma of his wartime experiences, whose irrationality called into question whether there was any meaning in the universe at large or in Lewis’s personal existence in particular. The literature concerning the Great War and its aftermath emphasises the physical and psychological damage it wreaked on soldiers at the time, and on their return home. Many students returning to study at Oxford University after the war experienced considerable difficulty adjusting to normal life, leading to frequent nervous breakdowns. Lewis appears to have “partitioned” or “compartmentalised” his life as a means of retaining his sanity. The potentially devastating memories of his traumatic experiences were carefully controlled so that they had a minimal impact on other areas of his life. Literature—above all, poetry—was Lewis’s firewall, keeping the chaotic and meaningless external world at a safe distance, and shielding him from the existential devastation it wreaked on others.
We can see this process in Surprised by Joy, where we find Lewis distancing himself from the prospect of war. His thoughts about the future possibility of the horrors of conflict seem to mirror his later attitudes towards the past actuality.
I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.95
Lewis was prepared to allow his country to have his body—but not his mind. A border was fixed and patrolled in his mental world, which certain intrusive and disturbing thoughts were not permitted to cross. Lewis would not run away from reality. Instead, he would negotiate a “treaty” by which reality could be tamed, adapted, and constrained. It would be a “frontier” that certain thoughts would not be allowed to penetrate.
This “treaty with reality” would play a critical role in Lewis’s development, and we shall have cause to consider it further in later chapters. Lewis’s mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known. Lewis’s immediate postwar years were dominated by a search for meaning—not simply in terms of finding personal fulfilment and stability, but in terms of making sense of both his inner and outer worlds in a way that satisified his restless and probing mind.
Arrival at Oxford: April 1917
To make sense of Lewis’s attitude towards the Great War, we must first explore how he went into battle. Having spent the first few months of 1917 at Great Bookham, trying (somewhat unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to master mathematics, Lewis went up to University College, Oxford, on 29 April. For the first time since the English Civil War, when Charles I had made his military headquarters in the city in 1643, Oxford had become a military camp. The University Parks were turned into a parade ground and training area for new recruits. Many of the younger dons and college servants had gone to war. Lectures, if given at all, were sparsely attended. The Oxford University Gazette, normally given over to announcements of lectures and University appointments, published depressingly long lists of the fallen. These black-bordered lists spoke ominously of the carnage of the conflict.
Having virtually no students by 1917, Oxford’s colleges had to find ways of coping with a drastic reduction in their income. University College, normally bustling, had only a handful of students in residence.96 In 1914, the college boasted 148 undergraduates in residence; this plummeted to seven in 1917. A rare group photograph of college members taken in Trinity Term 1917 shows only ten people. Under the emergency statutes introduced in May 1915, University College relieved seven of its nine tutorial fellows of their duties; there was little for them to do.
Faced with a collapse in student numbers, University College needed funds urgently. Its internal sources of income slumped from £8,755 in 1913 to £925 in 1918.97 Like many other colleges, it came to depend on the War Office as a source of income. University College rented out college rooms and facilities for use as troop barracks and military hospitals. Other colleges provided accommodation for refugees from war-torn Europe, especially Belgium and Serbia.
At this stage, much of University College was given over to use as a military hospital. Lewis was allocated room 5 on staircase XII in Radcliffe Quad. While Lewis may have been physically present in an Oxford college, he cannot really be said to have begun his Oxford education at this time. There was hardly anyone available to tutor him, and few lectures were being given anywhere in the university. Lewis’s early impressions of the college were dominated by its “vast solitude.”98 One evening in July 1917, he wandered through silent staircases and empty passages, marvelling at its “strange poetry.”99
3.1 The undergraduates of University College, Trinity Term 1917. Lewis is standing on the right-hand side of the back row. The college don in the centre of the photograph is John Behan, Stowell Law Fellow from 1909–1918, whose contract of employment was “continued for the emergency period.”
Lewis’s main object in coming into residence in the summer term of 1917 was to join the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps.100 He submitted his application on 25 April, before arriving in Oxford.101 His application was accepted without difficulty five days later, this positive response partly reflecting the fact that Lewis had already served in the Combined Cadet Force at Malvern School.102 The college dean refused to arrange any academic tuition for him, on the grounds that his courses with the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps would take up all his time. Undeterred, Lewis made a private arrangement to be taught algebra under John Edward Campbell (1862–1924) of Hertford College, who refused to accept any fee for his services.103
Why this sudden concern to become proficient at mathematics, not normally seen as relevant to the study of the life and thought of the classical world? The answer lies partly in Lewis’s desire to pass Responsions, but mainly in Albert Lewis’s essentially correct perception that his son would stand a much better chance of surviving the war if he were to become an artillery officer.104 Much better to be bombarding the Germans from well behind the front lines than to engage in the lethal trench warfare that had already claimed so many lives. However, the Royal Artillery required a knowledge of mathematics on the part of its officers, especially trigonometry, that Lewis simply did not have at this stage. It soon became painfully clear to Lewis that he would never master this field. He gloomily informed his father that his “chances of getting into the gunners” were low, as they recruited only officers “who can be shown to have some special knowledge of mathematics.”105
Lewis’s brief time at University College made a deep impression on him. He shared some of his feelings and experiences with Arthur Greeves, and rather fewer of them with his father and brother. He wrote to Greeves about the delights of bathing “without the tiresome convention of bathing things,” and the wonderfully atmospheric library of the Oxford Union Society. “I never was happier in my life.”106 He seems to have invented other experiences for his father’s benefit, being particularly anxious to conceal his increasingly trenchant atheism. He wrote to Albert Lewis about church and churches, but did not actually attend them.
Lewis was left in no doubt that he was being trained for trench warfare. His letters to his father towards the end of his time with the Officers’ Training Corps deal with the preparations for war in France, including his description of model trenches, complete with “dug outs, shell holes and—graves.”107 After appraising Lewis’s record, Lieutenant G. H. Claypole, the adjutant of the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, reported that Lewis was “likely to make a useful officer, but will not have had sufficient training for admission to an O[fficer] T[raining] U[unit] before the end of June. INFANTRY.” Lewis’s fate was sealed. He would be sent to an infantry unit—almost certainly to fight in the trenches of France.
The Officer Cadet at Keble College
The Great War ruined lives and shattered dreams, forcing many to abandon their hopes for the future in order to serve their country. Lewis is a classic example of the reluctant soldier—a young man with literary and scholarly ideals and ambitions, who found his life redirected and reshaped by forces over which he had no control, and which he ultimately could not resist. University College saw 770 students serve in the Great War; 175 of these were killed in battle. Even in his short time at University College in the summer of 1917, Lewis would have been aware of how many of the College’s undergraduates had gone to war, never to return. The fate of so many is captured in the sombre lines of the 1916 poem “The Spires of Oxford,” by Winifred Mary Letts (1882–1972):108
I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The grey spires of Oxford
Against a pearl-grey sky;
My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.
Lewis would train alongside other young men of ideals and ambition, many seeing their enforced wartime service as “doing their bit” for their country, hoping to pick up their lives and start all over again once the war was over. Space allows us to note only one such example—the adjutant of the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, who fatefully recommended that Lewis serve in the infantry.
Gerald Henry Claypole (1894–1961) served as lieutenant in the 5th King’s Royal Rifle Corps.109 He resigned his commission on 8 February 1919 due to ill health. Jerry Claypole had a love of English literature, which eventually led him to become Senior English Master at King Edward VII School in Sheffield in 1941. He retired in 1958, and died in January 1961. His obituary in the school magazine commented on his strong belief “that literature was to be experienced and enjoyed, not to be made the subject of theorising and argument”—precisely the views that Lewis himself would later develop and champion.110 It is highly likely that Claypole would have read some of Lewis’s writings, not least his introduction to Paradise Lost. Would Claypole have realised that he had played such a significant role in the subsequent twistings and turnings of Lewis’s life? We shall never know.
What we do know is that on 7 May 1917, Lewis began training as a potential infantry officer in the British army. He was now irreversibly committed to active military service. By a welcome quirk of fate, this did not mean leaving Oxford and transferring to one of the many training camps then scattered throughout Britain. Lewis was transferred from the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps and posted to E Company, No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, stationed at Keble College, Oxford.111
A “School of Instruction” for Oxford students who were potential officers was established in January 1915. Some three thousand officer cadets passed through the school.112 In February 1916, with the needs of the war effort in mind, the British army altered its regulations concerning officer cadets. Potential officers would have to be trained at an Officer Cadet Battalion. Only those aged over eighteen years and six months, and who were already serving in the ranks or had attended an Officers’ Training Corps, were eligible to apply. Even though Lewis had been a member of the Officers’ Training Corps for only a few weeks, this was enough to allow him to train as a future officer at one of the Officer Cadet Battalions.
Two such units were based at Oxford: No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion and No. 6 Officer Cadet Battalion. Each of these maintained a nominal strength of 750, and were billeted in otherwise empty Oxford colleges. No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion consisted of five companies of cadets, from A through E. Lewis was assigned to E Company, and billeted in Keble College. Lewis was relieved to remain in Oxford. Having to live at Keble College was, however, another matter.
3.2 Keble College, Oxford, as photographed by Henry W. Taunt (1860–1922) in 1907. The characteristic brickwork of the college, which contrasted sharply with the stone of other Oxford colleges of this period, is clearly visible.
Keble was one of Oxford’s more recent collegiate foundations,113 with a grim reputation for its High Church Anglicanism and its somewhat Spartan living conditions. In founding Keble College in 1870, its sponsors had aimed to create an institution where an Oxford education could be made available for “gentlemen wishing to live economically.” As a result, living conditions in the college were frugal and austere at the best of times. The additional privations caused by the war meant that the college offered only the most basic of comforts to its unfortunate occupants.
Lewis had to leave a rather comfortable set of rooms at University College for “a carpetless little cell with two beds (minus sheets or pillows) at Keble.”114 Lewis shared this miserable room with Edward Francis Courtenay (“Paddy”) Moore, an officer cadet of almost exactly his own age,115 who had also been assigned to E Company of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, joining the same day as Lewis himself: 7 May 1917. The majority of cadets who passed through Oxford on this course were not members of Oxford University. Some came from Cambridge; others—such as Moore—had little or no background in higher education. Although Moore had come to Oxford from Bristol, he had been born in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), County Dublin. We see here an early example of Lewis’s tendency to become close to people of Irish extraction—such as Theobold Butler and Nevill Coghill—while in England.
Along with Moore, Lewis formed friendships with four other young men in E Company: Thomas Kerrison Dawey, Denis Howard de Pass, Martin Ashworth Somerville, and Alexander Gordon Sutton. Lewis could not have known it, but eighteen months later he would mourn his colleagues. “I remember five of us at Keble, and I am the only survivor.”116
From his correspondence of this period, it seems that Lewis was initially drawn to Somerville, rather than to his roommate, Moore. Somerville, he tells his father in a letter written a few days after joining the battalion, is his “chief friend,” who, though quiet, is “very booky and interesting”; Moore, however, was a “little too childish for real companionship.”117 Yet Lewis had little time for reading now; days of trench digging and forced marches put an end to that. Only his weekends were free; these he spent back in his rooms at University College, catching up on his correspondence.
Yet as time passed, Lewis seems to have formed an increasingly close friendship with Moore. Lewis and his small group of friends went frequently to the nearby lodgings of Paddy’s mother, Mrs. Jane King Moore. Mrs. Moore, originally from County Louth in Ireland, had separated from her husband, a civil engineer in Dublin, and had temporarily moved to Oxford from Bristol with her twelve-year-old daughter, Maureen, to be close to Paddy. At that time, she had taken rooms in Wellington Square, not far from Keble College. When Lewis first met Mrs. Moore, she was forty-five years old—almost exactly the same age as Lewis’s mother, Flora, when she had died in 1908.
3.3 C. S. Lewis (left) and Paddy Moore (right) in Oxford during the summer of 1917. The identity of the figure to the back of the photograph is unknown.
It is clear from correspondence that Lewis and Mrs. Moore found each other attractive and engaging. Lewis first mentioned this “Irish lady” in a letter to his father of 18 June.118 Mrs. Moore later wrote to Albert Lewis in October of that year, remarking that his son, who was her son’s roommate, was “very charming and most likeable and won golden opinions from everyone he met.”119
The wartime Battalion Orders for No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel J. G. Stenning, have survived in the form of a yellowing set of duplicated foolscap sheets.120 These documents, covering the years 1916–1918, are clearly incomplete and do not give a full picture of the identity or activities of this training unit. Not all of the officer cadets are mentioned specifically by name, and some names are incorrectly entered. For example, Paddy Moore was initially registered as “E. M. C. Moore”—an error corrected a week later to “E. F. C. Moore.”121 Nevertheless, despite their incompleteness and errors, these records give us a good picture of the training Lewis would have received—courses in the use of the “Lewis gun” (as the Lewis Automatic Machine Gun was popularly known) and how to survive a gas attack, compulsory church parades on Sunday, rules about discussing military matters with civilians, arrangements for intercollegiate cricket matches, and physical training exercises. Other records give us a good idea of the sort of training Lewis would have had in using weapons, especially rifles.122
The records also reveal the surprising fact that there were two C. S. Lewises in training at Keble College in the summer of 1917. The C. S. Lewis on which our narrative focusses joined E Company on 7 May 1917.123 On 5 July 1917, another C. S. Lewis, assigned to the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, joined C Company.124 Three months later, this Lewis was “discharged to commission” in the 6th Middlesex Regiment.125
It is clear from his correspondence of July 1917 that Lewis himself had become aware that another C. S. Lewis was also in training at Keble College at that time. He emphasised the importance of including “E Company” on any letters addressed to him, in order to keep correspondence intended for him from being delivered to the other C. S. Lewis, attached to C Company.126 So who was this second C. S. Lewis? Happily, the records are good enough to allow an answer to this question.
Shortly after the end of the war, a complete list of every cadet who trained in C Company of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion was drawn up by their company commander, Captain F. W. Matheson, and checked against the official British army list of December 1918. Matheson then wrote to every known member of the company, and—where he received a reply—published their most recent address. This rare document, published privately by Keble College in 1920, includes the following reference:127
- Lewis, C. S. 2nd Lt., 6th Middlesex Regt.
- Brynawel, Pentala, Aberavon.
The annotation clearly indicates that Matheson was able to establish contact with this Lewis from C Company after the war and confirm his address—in South Wales. It is possible that confusion over these two C. S. Lewises may account for the War Office’s failure to pay Lewis some salary he was owed around this time.128
Lewis’s Wartime Experiences at Oxford
On 24 October 1922, Lewis returned to University College for a meeting of the Martlets, a college literary society that he had been instrumental in reestablishing after the Great War. The group, Lewis discovered, were meeting on this occasion in the set of rooms that he himself had occupied in 1917. His diary entry for that day in 1922 is of interest, as it relates three memories of significance to him dating from five years earlier:
Here I first was brought home drunk: here I wrote some of the poems in Spirits in Bondage. D had been in this room.129
Each of these memories alerts us to key aspects of Lewis’s personal development during his time at Oxford in the summer of 1917. Only one of them was literary in character.
The first such memory concerns a dinner party in June 1917, when Lewis became “royally drunk.” Lewis recalls the dinner as being at Exeter College; the evidence suggests it may actually have been at nearby Brasenose College, which itself points to Lewis’s state of drunkenness on the evening in question. Disinhibited under the influence of what were clearly substantial quantities of alcohol, Lewis unwisely let slip his growing interest in sadomasochism, which he had already confided a little shamefully to Arthur Greeves.130 Lewis recalls that he went around imploring everyone to let him “whip them for the sum of 1s. a lash.”131 Lewis had no other memory of that debauched evening, other than waking up on the floor of his own room in University College the next morning.
This intriguing streak in the young Lewis’s character seems to have emerged earlier that year, and led him to investigate the erotic writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Lewis also took pleasure around this time in reading the sections of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1770) dealing with the pleasures of beating, and compared himself to William Morris (1834–1896) as “a special devotee of the rod.” He apologised to Greeves at one point for writing a letter “across his knee,” only to find that this phrase triggered distracting erotic associations in his mind:
“Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for Whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish, nursery associations wd. have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.132
Although Lewis’s flagellant fantasies generally concerned beautiful women (possibly including Greeves’s sister Lily),133 his Oxford letters suggest he was also prepared to extend these to young men.
Three of his letters to Arthur Greeves of early 1917 are signed “Philomastix” (Greek, “lover of the whip”).134 In these letters, Lewis tries to explain something of his growing fascination with the “sensuality of cruelty,” in the knowledge that Greeves did not share it and would not condone it. “Very, very few,” Lewis conceded, were “affected in this strange way”135—and Greeves was certainly not one of them. Indeed, Lewis used a nickname for Greeves from about the spring of 1915 to the summer of 1918—“Galahad,” a reference to his confidant’s purity and ability to withstand the temptations to which Lewis himself clearly felt drawn.
Lewis’s teasing of Greeves on this point is clearly grounded in fact. Greeves’s personal diary around this time does indeed show a marked concern for his personal purity, especially after his confirmation into the Church of Ireland on 10 June 1917. This church service marked Greeves’s religious “coming of age,” which Greeves clearly regarded as a spiritual landmark. Perhaps unknown to Lewis, his friend seems to have been passing through some kind of crisis around this time. His diary mingles prayer that he may “keep pure minded”136 with darker concerns about the meaninglessness of life. “What a terrible life! What is it all for? Trust in Him.”137 The diaries reveal a lonely young man, who saw his friendship with Lewis and his faith in God as fixed stars in a gloomy and unstable firmament.
The second memory relates to Lewis’s growing aspiration to be remembered as a poet. By this stage, there was increasing recognition of the category of the “war poet,” which included writers such as Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Robert Graves (1895–1985), and Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), the last of which achieved particular fame for three lines from “The Soldier”:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Brooke died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on 23 April 1915, on his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. He was buried in a “corner of a foreign field” in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.
Inspired by such examples, Lewis began to write his own war poetry during his time at Oxford, while preparing for conflict. These poems, published in March 1919 under the pseudonym “Clive Hamilton” (Hamilton was his mother’s maiden name), have never been well regarded, and are rarely reprinted. Lewis initially titled the poems Spirits in Prison: A Cycle of Lyrical Poems. Albert Lewis, who was more widely read than many appreciated, pointed out that a novel by this name had been published by Robert Hitchens in 1908. Lewis took the point, and changed the title to Spirits in Bondage.138
Yet it is questionable whether Spirits in Bondage can properly be classified as war poetry. By my reckoning, over half of the poems in this collection were written before Lewis actually went to France and saw active service. These earlier poems are somewhat intellectualised reflections on war from a safe distance, untainted by the passions, despair, and brutality of the killing fields of France. The poems are often intellectually interesting, yet fail to sustain the poetic vision of a Sassoon or a Brooke.
So what do these poems tell us about Lewis? They are, after all, the first significant published works from his pen.139 Stylistically, they perhaps show that Lewis’s voice had some way to go before it would achieve its mature authority. At this stage in his career, however, the poems are of particular interest on account of their witness to his trenchant atheism. The most interesting parts of the cycle are its protests against a silent, uncaring heaven. The “Ode for New Year’s Day,” written when under fire near the French town of Arras in January 1918, declares the final death of a God who was in any case a human fabrication. Any idea that the “red God” might “lend an ear” to human cries of misery lay discredited and abandoned in the mud, a disgraced “Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.”140
These lines are important, as they express two themes that were clearly deeply impressed upon Lewis’s mind at this time: his contempt for a God he did not believe to exist, yet wished to blame for the carnage and destruction that lay around him; and his deep longing for the safety and security of the past—a past he clearly believed to have been destroyed forever. This note of wistfulness over the irretrievability of a loved past is a recurrent theme in Lewis’s later writings.
Perhaps the most important thing that Spirits in Bondage tells us about Lewis is aspirational—namely, that Lewis wanted to be remembered as a poet, and believed that he had the talent necessary to achieve this calling. Although Lewis is today remembered as a literary critic, apologist, and novelist, none of these corresponds to his own youthful dreams and hopes of his future. Lewis is a failed poet who found greatness in other spheres of writing. Yet some would say that, having failed as a writer of poetry, Lewis succeeded as a writer of prose—a prose saturated with the powerful rhythms and melodious phrasing of a natural poet.
But what of the third memory? Who is “D”?141 And why does Lewis attach such importance to D’s visit to his room in 1917? As the later diary makes clear, the reference is to Mrs. Moore, with whom Lewis was then living. This complex relationship, of which we shall have much more to say in due course, began during Lewis’s time as an officer cadet at Keble College. Paddy Moore may have been the original occasion for Lewis’s intimacy with Moore’s mother, but the relationship rapidly developed independently of him.
There is no doubt that Lewis was close to Paddy Moore. Indeed, the relationship may have been closer than most biographers realise. A personal bond appears to have developed between Lewis and Moore during the time they shared a room together at Keble College. To explore this point, let us reflect on the question of the regiment of the British army in which Lewis would serve. On 26 September 1917, Lewis received a temporary commission as second lieutenant in the 3rd Somerset Light Infantry and was given a month’s leave before being sent for further training in South Devon.142 Paddy Moore was given a commission in the Rifle Brigade and was posted to the Somme.
But why did Lewis join the Somerset Light Infantry, when he had no family connections whatsoever with the county of Somerset? Most biographies fail to appreciate the importance of this question. There were certainly alternatives open to Lewis. One of the most obvious was the Oxford-based Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, to which many of the cadets of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion were assigned. His Belfast origins meant that Lewis would also have had the option of being posted to one of the Irish regiments. So why did he end up with a commission in the Somerset Light Infantry?
Perhaps the Battalion Orders of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion contain a vital clue allowing us to answer this question. When an officer cadet is referred to in these documents, he is identified by the regiment to which he was provisionally assigned at the time of his recruitment, in which he would serve unless posted elsewhere—for example, as a result of technical skills he might demonstrate in training. The Battalion Orders indicate that the “other” C. S. Lewis, for example, was initially assigned to the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, but ended up being commissioned into the 6th Middlesex Regiment. Those same Battalion Orders record Paddy Moore’s date of arrival at the course on 7 May 1917 in the following manner:143
37072 Moore, E. M. C. Som L. I. 7.5.17
The vital clue to Lewis’s choice of regiment lies here: Moore’s assigned regiment was the Somerset Light Infantry. This makes perfect sense, since the Moores’ home was in Redland, a suburb of the city of Bristol, which was treated as lying within the county of Somerset for military recruitment purposes. The corresponding entry in the Battalion Orders for Lewis makes it clear that he was initially assigned to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
We therefore must take very seriously the possibility that Lewis requested a commission in the Somerset Light Infantry in the belief that this would allow him to serve alongside his close friend Paddy Moore. Was there some kind of pact between the two men, by which they would look after each other in the war? This possibility is strongly supported by Jane Moore’s letter to Albert Lewis of 17 October 1917, in which she expresses Paddy’s deep sorrow that he and Lewis would not be serving alongside each other in the Somersets.144 The tone of this letter makes perfect sense if there had been an expectation that the two men would both be posted to the Somerset Light Infantry, allowing them to face the challenges of conflict together.
As it turned out, Moore was notified that he had been given a temporary commission in the Rifle Brigade a few days after Lewis received his commission in the Somerset Light Infantry. If our speculative line of exploration is correct, Lewis would have been devastated when he learned that he would not be serving alongside his new friend. He would have to go to war alone, without any close friends to support him.
It was during this visit to Bristol that Maureen Moore overheard Lewis and her brother enter into a pact. If either of them should die during conflict, the other would look after the deceased’s remaining parent. It is not clear whether this pact was devised before or after Moore learned that he had been posted to the Rifle Brigade. Yet this development can easily be seen as an expression of a deeper bond between the two men, which developed at Oxford.
Lewis’s relationship with his own family went into tailspin around this time. Albert Lewis expected that Lewis would spend his leave with him at Little Lea in Belfast. In fact, Lewis went to stay with the Moores in Bristol for three weeks, paying only a somewhat reluctant and perfunctory visit to his father (12–18 October) before joining his regiment at Crownhill, a “village of wooden huts” near Plymouth.145 A slightly furtive letter to his father, written from Bristol, told Albert Lewis only part of the story.146 Lewis had developed “a cold,” and Mrs. Moore had sent him to bed.
For things had clearly moved on. On his return to Crownhill, Lewis wrote a hasty letter to Arthur Greeves, asking him to disregard certain things he had unwisely said about “a certain person.”147 Although the circumstantial evidence is strong that this is a reference to his growing intimacy with Mrs. Moore, it is not absolutely conclusive. Still, it fits a growing picture of deception and intrigue, by which Lewis sought to conceal this problematic yet special relationship from his father. Lewis was perfectly aware that if Albert Lewis were ever to learn the truth, their own relationship—already strained—could be totally ruptured. What if his father were to see Lewis’s letter to Greeves of 14 December 1917, in which he explicitly referred to Greeves and Mrs. Moore as “the two people who matter most . . . in the world”?148
Deployment to France: November 1917
Paddy Moore was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade in October. Both Lewis and his father feared that Lewis would also be deployed to fight in France. Yet suddenly, everything changed. Lewis wrote to his father in “great excitement” on 5 November: he had just heard that his battalion was to be deployed to Ireland!149 Political tensions in Ireland were high, partly on account of the simmering aftermath of the Easter Rising. While this posting would not be without its dangers, Albert Lewis could hardly have failed to recognise that an Irish posting would be far less hazardous than the front line in France. In the end, the 3rd Somerset moved to the Irish city of Londonderry in November 1917, and then to Belfast in April 1918.
But Lewis did not move with them after all. He had been transferred to the 1st Somerset,150 a combat regiment which had been stationed in France since August 1914.151 The expectation was that the new recruits would be undergoing extensive further training before going into action. But again, things began to move very quickly. In the early evening of Thursday, 15 November, Lewis urgently telegraphed his father. He had been given forty-eight hours’ leave before he had to report to Southampton for disembarkation to France. He was now in Bristol, staying with Mrs. Moore. Could his father come and visit him?152 Albert Lewis wired back: he didn’t understand what Lewis meant. Could he write and explain?
Lewis frantically wired his father again on the morning of Friday, 16 November. He had been ordered to France and was due to sail the following afternoon. He needed to know if his father could visit him before he left. Yet like the silent heaven against which Lewis protested in his poetry, Albert Lewis failed to reply. In the end, Lewis sailed for France without being able to say farewell to his father. The casualty rates among inexperienced junior officers were appallingly high. Lewis might never return. Albert Lewis’s failure to appreciate the importance of that critical moment did nothing to mend his troubled relationship with his son. Some would say it ruptured it completely.
On 17 November, Lewis sailed from Southampton to Le Havre in Normandy to join his regiment. On his nineteenth birthday, Lewis was transferred, friendless, to the trenches near Monchy-le-Preux, east of the French town of Arras, close to the border with Belgium. Albert Lewis, meanwhile, tried yet again to get Lewis transferred to an artillery regiment. However, he was advised that only Lewis himself could request such a transfer, and this would require Lewis’s commanding officer’s permission in writing.153 In a letter written from what Lewis describes as “a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,” he rejected this possibility.154 He would rather stay with his infantry regiment.
Although Lewis’s letter of 13 December suggests that he was safely behind the front line, this was not the case. In fact, Lewis was already in the trenches, although he withheld this information in his correspondence with his father until 4 January 1918, presumably to shield him from anxiety. Even then, Lewis played down the danger of his situation. He reported that he was in danger only once —a shell had fallen near him, and that was when he was using the latrines.155
Lewis’s scant references to the horrors of trench warfare confirm both its objective realities (“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”) and his own subjective distancing of himself from this experience (it “shows rarely and faintly in memory” and is “cut off from the rest of my experience”).156 This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lewis’s “treaty with reality”—the construction of a frontier, a barrier, which protected Lewis from such shocking images as “horribly smashed men,” and allowed him to continue his life as if these horrors had been experienced by someone else. Lewis spun a cocoon around himself, insulating his thoughts from rotting corpses and the technology of destruction. The world could be kept at bay—and this was best done by reading, and allowing the words and thoughts of others to shield him from what was going on around him.
Lewis’s experience of this most technological and impersonal of wars was filtered and tempered through a literary prism. For Lewis, books were both a link to the remembered—if sentimentally exaggerated—bliss of a lost past and a balm for the trauma and hopelessness of the present. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves several months later, he looked back wistfully to happier days, in which he sat surrounded by his “little library and browsed from book to book.”157 Those days, he reflected with obvious sadness, were gone.
Clement Attlee, a University College undergraduate who later became British prime minister, calmed his nerves under shell fire in the Great War by imagining himself taking a walk through Oxford.158 Lewis preferred to read books to achieve the same outcome. Yet Lewis did more than read—though he read voraciously—while on active service in France. He also wrote poems. His cycle Spirits in Bondage includes a group of poems that clearly are a response to the directly experienced realities of war—such as “French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux).” Lewis had discovered the calming and coping impact, not merely of reading literature, but of putting his feelings into his own words. It was as if the mental process of forging sentences tempered and tamed the emotions that originally inspired them. As he once advised his confidant Arthur Greeves, “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”159
For most of February 1918, Lewis was hospitalised in No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport, not far from Dieppe on the French coast. Like so many others, he was suffering from “trench fever,” often referred to as P. O. U. (“pyrexia origin unknown”), a condition widely believed to be spread by lice. Lewis wrote home to his father, recalling a happier time spent with his mother and brother at Berneval-le-Grand near Dieppe, only eighteen miles (29 kilometres) away, in 1907.160 His letters to Greeves from around this time are packed with news of books he had been reading, or intended to read—such as Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography. If the gods were kind to him, he remarked, he might have a relapse and have to stay in the hospital longer. But, he wryly remarked, the gods hated him. And who could blame them, given the way he felt about them?161 A week later, Lewis was out of the hospital. His company was moved out of the battle zone for further training at Wanquetin, practising the technique of “section rushes” in preparation for a major assault that was being planned, before moving back to the front line at Fampoux near Arras on 19 March.
Wounded in Battle: The Assault on Riez du Vinage, April 1918
Arthur Greeves’s diary for the months of March and April makes frequent reference to his own loneliness and his anxieties for Lewis. “I pray God to preserve my boy. I don’t know what I should do without him.”162 On 11 April 1918, Greeves recorded the contents of a letter he had just received from Mrs. Moore: her “dear son” had been “killed.”163 Greeves was distraught with grief over Paddy Moore and growing fears for the safety of his closest friend. Two days later, he confided his hope for Lewis: “If only Jack could get wounded. He is in God’s hands and I trust in Him to keep him safe.”164 Greeves’s deepest hope was that Lewis would be wounded severely enough to be taken out of the front lines, or possibly even brought home to England. In the end, that was precisely what happened.
The Somerset Light Infantry began their assault on the small, German-held village of Riez du Vinage at 6.30 p.m. on 14 April. The British heavy artillery laid down a creeping barrage, behind which the infantry advanced.165 The barrage was not sufficiently intense to suppress German resistance, and the advancing infantry came under heavy machine-gun fire. One of those wounded was Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, who died the following morning. Johnson, a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford, had joined up on 17 April 1917 and had become one of Lewis’s few friends in the army.166
Lewis, however, reached Riez du Vinage safely with his company. “I ‘took’ about sixty prisoners—that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-gray figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up.”167 By 7.15 p.m., the action was over. Riez du Vinage was in the hands of the Somerset Light Infantry.
The Germans immediately mounted a counterattack, initially by shelling the village, and then by launching an infantry assault, which was repelled. A German shell exploded close to Lewis, wounding him and killing Sergeant Harry Ayres, who was standing next to him at the time.168 Lewis was taken to No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital near Etaples. A letter, presumably written by a nurse, was sent immediately to Albert Lewis, informing him that his son was “slightly wounded.” This was followed by a similar telegram from the War Office: “2nd Lt. C. S. Lewis Somerset Light Infantry wounded April fifteenth.”169
Albert Lewis, however, seems to have persuaded himself that his son was severely wounded, and wrote to Warnie—by then promoted to the rank of captain170—expressing his distress. Warnie, alarmed that his seriously wounded brother might not survive for long, set out to visit him immediately. But how was he to get there? His brother was fifty miles (80 kilometres) away.
Warnie’s military record helps us understand what happened next. An examining officer responsible for assessing Warnie’s promotion prospects around this time declared that he was “NOT a good horseman,” but he was nevertheless “a keen motor-cyclist.” In a move that was at one and the same time predictable and imaginative, Warnie borrowed a motorbike and drove nonstop over rough terrain to see his brother in the field hospital. He was reassured to find that his brother was not in danger.171
In fact, Lewis had suffered a shrapnel wound that was sufficiently serious to merit his being sent back to England, but not life threatening—what many in the army then termed a “Blighty wound.” Lewis had suffered lightly in comparison with others; shortly afterwards, he finally learned that his friend Paddy Moore was missing, believed dead.
It was at this time that Greeves wrote to Lewis, confiding that he realised he was probably homosexual, something Lewis had most likely already guessed.172 Lewis’s response to Greeves’s confession shows a surprising tolerance towards this development, linked with a suspicion of traditional moral values: “Congratulations old man. I am delighted that you have had the moral courage to form your own opinions <independently,> in defiance of the old taboos.”173 While probably relieved that his friendship with Lewis had survived this disclosure, Greeves nevertheless confided to his diary that he felt “rather sad” on receiving Lewis’s letter.174 It is possible that a close reading of this letter led Greeves to realise that Lewis had subtly indicated that he did not share this sexuality.
So did Greeves have hopes that Lewis might share his sexual orientation? It is important to realise that Greeves’s diary around this time indicates a deep emotional attachment to Lewis, which is without parallel elsewhere in Greeves’s life. To judge by his diary entries, no other figure—male or female—plays such a significant role in his life, even though Lewis is physically absent for most of the time. When Lewis fails to write to him, Greeves sinks into despair. “Feel so unhappy regarding Jack, is he sick of me? Never a word from him.”175 His final entry for 1918 is particularly revealing: “What would I do without J[ack]?”176 The evidence clearly suggests—but does not prove—that the chief object of Greeves’s affections was Lewis himself.
This could easily have become a serious problem for the two young men. In the end, Greeves appears to have accepted the realities of the situation. Any awkwardness between the two on this point appears to have evaporated with relative ease, and did not become an issue of contention between them.177 Lewis continued to regard Greeves as his confidant and closest friend at this time, and remained in touch with him until weeks before his death in 1963. Yet Lewis’s complex relationship with Greeves clearly had an impact on Lewis’s reflections on the focus and limits of friendship. It is important for readers of The Four Loves (1960) to appreciate that Lewis is here exploring, among other matters, the boundaries of intimacy, affection, and respect within male relationships.
Meanwhile, Lewis returned to England and became a patient at the Endsleigh Palace Hospital for Officers on 25 May 1918. This building was originally a London hotel, which had been requisitioned by the War Office to cope with the stream of wounded officers returning home from France. Lewis was well enough to be able to go to the opera (he tells Arthur Greeves of his delight at a performance of Wagner’s Valkyrie), and to travel to Great Bookham to visit the “Great Knock.” Lewis penned a long and affectionate letter to his father, describing this “pilgrimage,” and inviting him to come and visit him in London.178 Albert Lewis, however, never visited his son during his convalescence.179 But Mrs. Moore did. In fact, she moved out of Bristol to be with him.
Lewis and Mrs. Moore: An Emerging Relationship
So what was going on between Lewis and Mrs. Moore? Several factors must be taken into account in trying to reach some kind of understanding about the situation. First, we have no documents, including records of personal testimony, which allow us to reach reliable conclusions. Late in life Mrs. Moore destroyed her letters from Lewis. The only other person Lewis would have confided in about his relationship would have been Arthur Greeves. Again, we have no evidence from this source casting unambiguous light on this question.
We do, however, understand something of the context against which this relationship developed. We know that Lewis had lost his mother, and thus needed maternal affection and understanding at a difficult time in his life, when he was away from home and friends. Furthermore, he was preparing to go to war, facing possible death. Studies of the Great War emphasise its subversive impact on British social and moral conventions around this time. Young men about to go to the Front were the object of sympathy for women, old and young, which often led to passionate—yet generally ephemeral—affairs. Lewis, as his letters to Arthur Greeves indicate, was a sexually inquisitive young man. We are perfectly entitled to wonder what Mrs. Moore was doing in Lewis’s rooms in University College in 1917—a memory that Lewis so clearly cherished, to judge by his diary entry of 1922.
It is possible that Mrs. Moore fused Lewis’s idealised notions of women as the caring, supportive, empathetic mother on the one hand, and the exciting lover on the other. I have often been struck by what many regard as the most haunting of C. S. Lewis’s poems—the sonnet titled “Reason,” probably written in the early 1920s. Lewis here contrasts the clarity and strength of reason (symbolised by Athene, the “maid” of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother). For Lewis, the big question is this: Is there anyone who can be “both maid and mother” to him?180
Who indeed could achieve such a fusion, reconciling what many would see as polar opposites? At the intellectual level, Lewis was searching for a true marriage of reason and imagination—something that eluded him totally as a young man. It seemed to him then that his life of the mind was split into two disconnected hemispheres. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”181 Lewis’s later discovery of the Christian faith offered him a synthesis of reason and imagination which he found persuasive and authentic till the end of his life.
Might there be a deeper meaning to Lewis’s imagery and words here, whether Lewis intended them or not? Might there be a hint at Lewis’s desire for a woman who would nourish both his mind and his body? Was Mrs. Moore both the “mother” that Lewis had lost and the “maid” for whom he yearned?
What can be said with some confidence is that the circumstantial evidence suggests that Lewis developed a complex relationship with Mrs. Moore in the summer of 1917. George Sayer (1914–2005), a close friend of Lewis’s who is widely regarded as one of his most insightful biographers, initially regarded their relationship as ambivalent but ultimately platonic. Older studies sympathetic to Lewis—including Sayer’s important and relatively recent study Jack (1988)—considered and rejected the possibility that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were lovers. Yet the tide of opinion has changed. Sayer himself illustrates this shifting consensus. In a revised introduction to later editions of this work, written in 1996, Sayer stated that he was now “quite certain” that Lewis and Mrs. Moore had been lovers, and furthermore argued that this development was “not surprising,” given Lewis’s deep and unresolved emotional needs and conflicts at this time.182 Yet their relationship cannot really be described as merely “sexual,” if this is understood to define its focus and limits. Rather, it appears to have been strongly shaped by both maternal and romantic factors.
What is difficult to understand is perhaps not why such a relationship developed immediately before Lewis went to the Front, possibly never to return, but why this relationship continued for so long afterwards. Most wartime affairs of this kind were short lived (often because of the death of the departing soldier in battle), and were generally based on sympathy and expediency, rather than being more deeply rooted in personal affection and trust. It seems likely that the “pact” between Lewis and Paddy Moore is important in understanding the nature of this relationship. This established a context within which this relationship could be rationalised to outsiders, and likely gave some form of moral justification to Lewis himself. Lewis had no Christian beliefs at this stage, and clearly regarded himself as free to establish such values and practices as he saw fit. We shall return to this matter in the following chapter.
On 25 June 1918, Lewis was moved to Ashton Court, a convalescent hospital in Clifton, Bristol, close to Mrs. Moore’s home. Lewis wrote to his father, explaining that he had tried to find a suitable hospital in Ireland, but none had been available.183 It was here that he initially learned that his Spirits in Prison (as it was then titled) had been refused for publication by Macmillan, and subsequently that it had been accepted by Heinemann. At this stage, Lewis proposed to publish under the pen name “Clive Staples.” On 18 November, he changed this to “Clive Hamilton,” drawing on his mother’s maiden name to conceal his identity.184 The book would be published in March 1919.
In the meantime, Lewis was transferred to Perham Downs Camp on Salisbury Plain on 4 October. Mrs. Moore duly followed him, renting rooms in a nearby cottage. Lewis here enjoyed the unusual luxury of having a room to himself. On 11 November, the Great War finally came to an end. Lewis was transferred again—this time to an Officers Command Depot in Eastbourne, in Sussex. Again, Mrs. Moore followed him. Lewis informed his father of this arrangement—it was no longer a matter he regarded as secret—and announced that he was due some leave from 10 to 22 January, when he would come over to Belfast. Warnie, who was also due some leave from soldiering in France, arrived in Belfast on 23 December 1918, in time to celebrate Christmas with his father.
Then things moved with unexpected pace. Lewis was discharged from the hospital and demobilised on 24 December. Unable to alert his family in advance to his changed circumstances, he made his way home to Belfast unannounced. Warnie’s diary entry for 27 December takes up the story:185
A red letter day today. We were sitting in the study about 11 o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jacks! He has been demobilized. . . . We had lunch and then all three went for a walk. It was as if the evil dream of four years had passed away and we were still in 1915.
On 13 January 1919, Lewis returned to Oxford to resume his studies at Oxford University, so cruelly interrupted by the Great War. He would remain there for the next thirty-five years.