Liu Yiushan participated in World War I

Lewis’s First World War service was both a military episode and a test of how he would meet reality. Before conscription could determine his future, he decided that he would serve when his age required it; until then, he would keep the war at a distance from his private life and mind. That boundary gave way to enlistment in 1917. He trained at Oxford, received a commission in the Somerset Light Infantry, reached the front line on his nineteenth birthday, and was wounded in April 1918. In retrospect, he drew from the war not only a confrontation with death but also an intellectual and emotional reorientation during convalescence.

Decision and the boundary with war

As the fighting on the Continent continued, Lewis foresaw that it would probably last until he reached military age. Irish boys of his age were not subject to conscription, so the decision to serve was still his to make. He chose to do so, but did not regard the choice as a reason to follow the war closely in advance. His commitment settled the future obligation; he treated the intervening years as his own.

Lewis described this stance as a treaty with reality: his country could claim him on a specified date, and he accepted that he might die in its wars, but until then he would live his own life. The boundary was explicit. He would take part in battles when called, but would not read about them beforehand. He acknowledged that others might see this as shameful or as a flight from reality; his own account presents it as a limit he set on the war’s claim over his attention.

He connected that limit to the conditions of his school life. An unhappy schoolboy, he argued, had to prevent the coming term from invading the present holidays; allowing the future to intrude could lead to despair. He also described an internal tension between the Hamilton and Lewis sides of his temperament, with the Hamilton in him guarding against the Lewis and its capacity for self-torment. The policy thus served not only to postpone engagement with war news, but also to protect the present from a future he could not yet control.

Oxford, enlistment, and training

In Trinity term of 1917, Lewis came into residence at Oxford with the practical aim of entering the University Officers’ Training Corps, which seemed his most promising route into the army. His studies still had to meet the requirements of Responsions, including elementary mathematics. He read algebra with Mr. Campbell of Hertford, but never passed Responsions; after the war, a decree exempting ex-servicemen made the unresolved examination irrelevant. Without that change, he thought he might have had to abandon the prospect of going to Oxford.

His Oxford term was unusually brief and unsettled. Less than a term after coming into residence, his papers arrived and he enlisted. Half of his College had been converted into a hospital under the R.A.M.C.; the rest housed a small undergraduate community of about eight, including two students not yet of military age, two considered unfit, and a Sinn Féiner unwilling to fight for England. They dined in a small lecture room. Lewis enjoyed the company, which included E. V. Gordon, A. C. Ewing, and Theobald Butler, but the makeshift community bore little resemblance to ordinary undergraduate life. For him it was an excited, unstable, and largely unproductive interval before army service.

Enlistment did not immediately take him away from Oxford. He was drafted into a Cadet Battalion billeted at Keble, then passed through the ordinary training course, which he recalled as mild compared with training in the more recent war. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, the old XIIIth Foot. The sequence—from university residence, through a college partly given over to hospital use, to military training and commission—made his entry into the army a rapid alteration of purpose and setting rather than a completed Oxford education.

Front-line service and the experience of army life

Lewis arrived in the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday in November 1917. Most of his service was in villages before Arras, including Fampoux and Monchy. In April 1918 he was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers. These details mark the principal outline of his service; he later set aside most of its incidents as having little bearing on the story he wished to tell.

Although he found the army detestable, he was surprised that he did not dislike it more. Its frank acknowledgment that military life was an odious necessity made it different from Wyvern, where hardship had been presented as pleasure. In his comparison, openly recognized tribulation was easier to bear: it could create camaraderie and, under intense conditions, affection among fellow sufferers. Suffering disguised as enjoyment instead encouraged distrust, cynicism, and concealed resentment. The contrast explains why the army, despite its hardships, seemed more bearable than the school he remembered.

He also found his military seniors kinder than the Bloods at Wyvern. He speculated that older adults were naturally more generous to nineteen-year-olds than thirteen-year-olds were to one another, because adults had less need to reassure themselves. He wondered as well whether his own expression had changed: the look he had been told to remove from his face seemed to have disappeared, perhaps after he read Phantastes, and to have been replaced by an expression that invited pity or kind amusement. On his first night in France, two middle-aged Canadians took charge of him among roughly a hundred officers sleeping on plank beds in a large hall, treating him as a friend. The recollection gives a human counterpoint to the impersonal machinery of service: military life brought not only danger and discipline, but also unexpected kindness.

Wounding, convalescence, and later meaning

Lewis later passed quickly over most of the war’s other experiences, including taking about sixty prisoners, being hit by an English shell, and the nursing care he received. He singled out two moments instead. The first came just after he had been hit, when he thought he had stopped breathing and concluded that he was dying. He recalled no fear and no courage; the prospect appeared to his mind as a dry, factual proposition rather than an emotionally charged event.

Years later, that moment gave personal force to Kant’s distinction between the Noumenal and Phenomenal self. Lewis understood the experience as evidence that a fully conscious “I” could be only loosely and temporarily connected to the “me” encountered through introspection. The war’s encounter with possible death thus became, in his retrospective account, a basis for thinking about consciousness and personal identity, rather than merely an episode of physical peril.

The second formative moment came in a Convalescent Camp on Salisbury Plain, where Lewis read Bergson. The reading helped him avoid what he called the snares surrounding the word Nothing, but its effect extended beyond an intellectual correction. Before then, his tastes had leaned toward the pale, remote, and evanescent. Bergson did not erase those earlier attachments; he gave Lewis another kind of response to life. Lewis said he learned to relish energy, fertility, urgency, and the triumphs of things that grow. He consequently became able to appreciate artists and writers whose forceful, affirmative work might previously have meant little to him, including Beethoven, Titian in his mythological paintings, Goethe, Dunbar, Pindar, Christopher Wren, and the more exultant Psalms.

Lewis returned to Oxford, demobilized, in January 1919. In his account, the war’s significance therefore extends beyond the chronology of enlistment, front-line service, and wounding: a moment of apparent death sharpened his thinking about the self, and convalescent reading widened the range of life and art he could value. He also warned that a large, complex episode in his personal life would be omitted from the story, saying only that his earlier hostility to the emotions had been fully and variously avenged. The omission sets a limit on what his memoir relates about this period, even as the military and intellectual consequences he does recount remain clear.