First World War

The First World War enters C. S. Lewis’s memoir both as a looming historical crisis and as a personal threshold. He decides that he will serve when he reaches military age, then attempts to keep the war at a distance until that time; in 1917 he becomes a Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, reaches the front on his nineteenth birthday, and is wounded in April 1918. Looking back, he gives the conflict a double meaning: it is a severe interruption of ordinary life, yet its acknowledged necessity makes it more bearable than the compulsory miseries of school, and one moment on the battlefield opens a lasting imaginative connection to Homer.

The war approaches

During Lewis’s last weeks at Wyvern in the summer of 1914, newspaper reports about the possibility of war began to intrude on school life. He remembered puzzling with a friend over a headline asking whether England could stay out of the conflict. The question seemed almost incomprehensible to the friend, who could not see how England might become involved. Lewis later admitted that memory might lend those final hours an apocalyptic cast; at the time, however, leaving Wyvern itself made the familiar surroundings feel already lost. The declaration of war came early in the holidays. Lewis’s brother, then on leave from Sandhurst, was recalled, and Lewis went to Great Bookham to study with Kirkpatrick.

The outbreak also altered how Lewis understood his own future. He expected that the war would probably last until he was old enough for military service. In Ireland there was no conscription, so the decision to serve belonged to him. He chose to enlist, but did not regard the choice as a reason to follow every development of the conflict in the meantime. He framed this separation as a limit: he would serve when the appointed time arrived, but until then would try to live his present life rather than surrender his attention to an uncertain future.

A boundary around the future

Lewis’s refusal to follow the war closely was neither indifference to the fact that he would serve nor a claim that the conflict was unimportant. He understood his decision to enlist as settling what he owed his country, and therefore as freeing him, for the time being, from continual attention to the war. His older brother Arthur faced a different circumstance: a heart condition ruled out service. Their situations mark the personal limits within which the war was experienced, without making either brother’s life identical to the other’s.

Lewis later called his stance a treaty with reality: a frontier between the war that awaited him and the life he could still lead before it. School had helped teach him to confine the future to its proper time; allowing the coming term to invade the holidays would have made an already unhappy life harder to bear. He also recognized a more uncomfortable element in his ease at adopting the policy: it suited his temperament to protect his mind from self-torment. In retrospect, he defended the practical wisdom of not trying to master reports that he believed were distorted as they passed from battlefield to command and from command to journalists. Without military knowledge or reliable maps, he thought, a schoolboy’s intense hopes and fears could rest on unstable information. He extended that skepticism to the recommendation that schoolboys read newspapers, arguing that much of what they absorbed as teenagers would be known before they could act on it.

From Oxford to military service

In the late winter term of 1916, Lewis went to Oxford to sit for a scholarship examination. He knew the result mattered because he believed that academic work offered him one of very few possible livelihoods. Kirkpatrick had already written to Lewis’s father that Lewis might become a writer or scholar, but was unlikely to succeed in another occupation; Lewis recognized the force of that judgment, and it sometimes frightened him. What diminished the examination’s power to overwhelm him was the expectation that, whether he won or lost, he would enter the army the following year. With his immediate future bounded by military service, a postwar career could seem too hypothetical to command his anxiety.

Trying to explain this to his father became another failed attempt to bring him into his real life. Lewis’s father answered with advice about concentration and hard work, the cost of educating his son, and the limited financial help he could provide later. Lewis did not consider idleness among his failings; what had failed was the conversation itself. His father’s desire for his confidence coexisted, in Lewis’s account, with an inability to silence his own thoughts long enough to receive an unfamiliar perspective. The war had changed the scale against which Lewis weighed the scholarship, but he could not make his father hear that change.

Lewis spent less than one term at Oxford before his enlistment papers arrived. The term was already abnormal: half the college had become a hospital in the hands of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the remaining undergraduates formed a small, unusual community. Lewis enjoyed his time there, though it was unsettled and unlike normal undergraduate life. Military service began without taking him away from Oxford at once: he was assigned to a Cadet Battalion billeted at Keble. After training, he received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, the old XIIIth Foot.

At the front

Lewis reached the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday in November 1917. He served mainly in villages before Arras, including Fampoux and Monchy, and was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers, in April 1918. The sequence fulfilled the commitment he had made while the war was still distant: the future he had kept at arm’s length became immediate military service.

The army was detestable, Lewis wrote, but its unpleasantness was acknowledged rather than disguised as an education in pleasure. No one expected the soldiers to enjoy it or pretended that it was anything other than an odious necessity. That honesty made hardship easier to endure than Wyvern’s enforced games and school discipline, where misery could be presented as a benefit. In the army, suffering could foster camaraderie and even affection among fellow sufferers; at Wyvern, the gap between what was imposed and what was claimed for it had encouraged distrust and resentment. Lewis also found his military elders kinder than the school’s senior boys, suggesting that greater age and genuine adulthood changed the relation between authority and the young.

The wartime recollection does not turn military life into an uncomplicated relief. Lewis describes a quiet period that ended with a major German attack in the spring. The attack fell on the Canadians to his right; Lewis’s line was kept quiet by heavy shelling, about three shells a minute through the day. In the trenches, winter weariness and water were persistent hardships. He remembered falling asleep while marching and waking to discover that he was still on the move, and walking in thigh-high gum boots through water above the knee. When concealed barbed wire punctured a boot, icy water welled inside it. These details make the front less a sequence of grand military actions than an environment of endurance, exposure, and uncertain danger.

Comradeship, death, and memory

The war also brought Lewis into close relation with ordinary soldiers. Sergeant Ayres became especially dear to him. Lewis described himself as a futile officer, moved about by Ayres like a puppet; the sergeant transformed that unequal and awkward relation into something beautiful and became almost a father to him. Lewis supposed that Ayres was killed by the same shell that wounded him. The connection made military service more than an obligation fulfilled: amid the war’s dislocation, an older soldier’s care gave Lewis a relationship he remembered with gratitude.

The front also confirmed an understanding of death that Lewis traced back to seeing his dead mother. Familiarity with both long-dead and recently dead people deepened his recognition of the dead as human beings worthy of pity and reverence. Yet he says that much of the war—the fear, cold, and damaged landscape—now appears only faintly in memory, cut off from the rest of his experience and at times seeming to have happened to someone else. That distance does not erase the losses around him. Recalling his Wyvern years, he notes that Ypres and the Somme killed most of the older boys whose school days had preceded his; he also remembers Ballygunnian, an Irish schoolmate who passed through the college without caring for its social ambitions and was killed in France. These deaths give the school’s prewar world a retrospectively fragile character.

Against the scale of military suffering, Lewis singles out a brief imaginative moment as more consequential to him than many of the war’s physical realities. The first bullet he heard was far away, with a sound that reminded him of descriptions by journalists and poets. He did not identify his response simply as fear or indifference. Instead, it was a slight tremor of recognition: this was war, and this was what Homer had written about. The moment does not make combat glorious or lessen its cost. It shows how the war entered Lewis’s imagination by joining present danger to an ancient literary inheritance, while the rest of his experience remained, in memory, partly severed from ordinary life.