Royal Army Service Corps

The Royal Army Service Corps was the wartime corps in which C. S. Lewis’s brother served in France during the Bookham period, from 1914 to 1916. In the memoir, its significance lies less in military activity than in its effect on family life: because the corps was then reckoned a safe place to serve, the brothers could meet on leave with less conscious anxiety than many wartime families endured.

Service and Wartime Context

C. S. Lewis’s brother was serving in France from 1914 to 1916, while C. S. Lewis was at Great Bookham. His intermittent appearances on leave punctuated that period. The account identifies his membership in the Royal Army Service Corps as the reason the family did not feel the same degree of anxiety that many other families experienced; it does not describe his duties or particular military operations.

Leave and Family Reunion

The leaves brought the brothers together again, briefly restoring the earlier pattern of their boyhood relationship. They tacitly set aside the strains that had developed before the elder brother went to France and used the short time available to revive the classic period of their childhood. His visits could also take the younger brother on journeys to Ireland, with first-class railway carriages and sleeping cars among the luxuries that made these excursions memorable.

Anxiety and Narrative Significance

The memoir qualifies the apparent reassurance of the corps’s reputation for safety. Although the brothers did not consciously experience the level of worry common in wartime, C. S. Lewis suggests that anxiety may have remained below the surface. He connects this possibility with a haunting mental image experienced on a bitter winter night at Bookham: his brother seemed to be in the garden, trying to call without being able to make himself heard. The passage is presented as an impression, neither a belief nor quite a dream, rather than as an actual visit or a prediction. The Royal Army Service Corps therefore marks a contrast in the narrative: its relative safety eases the family’s waking fears, while the disturbing image hints at an unease that conscious reassurance could not entirely dispel.