Second World War

The Second World War appears in C. S. Lewis’s memoir less as a continuous military chronicle than as a measure against which he reconsiders earlier patterns of fear, fellowship, and imaginative experience. He recalls the trenches’ exhaustion and danger, but also insists that the war’s realities could seem strangely detached from the rest of his life. In retrospect, a brief imaginative recognition—that this was the war of Homer—outweighs much of what followed.

The War as a Later Point of Comparison

Lewis’s recollections of school help explain why the war did not overturn his established sense of how people meet hardship. At Wyvern, fear and hostility toward Oldie had drawn the boys together, repeating a pattern Lewis had already experienced at home: adverse circumstances made a small group more closely allied. He later connected that early expectation of standing together against a larger force with the way he understood England’s position in 1940. The Second World War thus seemed familiar in its broad emotional structure, even though its scale and circumstances were different.

That outlook did not make Lewis indifferent to large events, but he described his attention as more readily captured by friendship than by impersonal causes. He said that friendship had been his chief source of happiness, while general society meant little to him, and that his interest in a battle tended to diminish as the number of combatants increased. His wartime perspective belongs to this particular way of seeing: a mass conflict is recalled through individual bonds and sharply bounded moments, rather than through a comprehensive account of military history.

Private Imagination and the Material World

The contrast between the war’s external conditions and Lewis’s inward life had already taken shape in earlier memories. Looking back on his years at Wyvern, he described two lives existing side by side: an outer existence of fatigue and discouragement, and an inner world of imaginative abundance. The painful school routine did not erase the moments when mythic figures and stories filled his mind; nor did the inward world make the hardship unreal. Lewis presents these experiences as simultaneous truths, not as competing versions from which one must be dismissed.

A similar contrast appears in his description of Belfast’s surroundings. From the hills, the view takes in the Lough, the distant coast, the quieter heights, and the industrial city below. The trams, traffic, and shipyards do not simply destroy the stillness of the hilltop; their noise intensifies the difference between that elevated prospect and the working world beneath it. The Second World War belongs to the same memoir-wide tension between material circumstances and the meanings an observer draws from them, although Lewis’s wartime account gives that tension a more immediate setting in the trenches.

Service and the Conditions of War

Lewis deliberately limits his account of the war, noting that others who witnessed more of it had already described it extensively. He recalls that the period was relatively quiet until a major German attack in the spring. The attack struck the Canadians to his right; Lewis’s own line was subjected to shelling intended to keep it in place. On that day, he noticed that the greater terror could overwhelm a lesser one: a shivering mouse did not flee from the equally frightened man it encountered.

Through the winter, weariness and water were constant adversaries. Lewis describes falling asleep while marching and waking to find that he was still on the move. In the trenches, water reached above the knee; concealed barbed wire could puncture a boot and let icy water in. These conditions make the war concrete without turning his memoir into a campaign narrative. The emphasis falls on repeated discomfort, physical fatigue, and the odd changes in perception produced by danger.

Lewis also recalls his relationship with Sergeant Ayres, an ordinary soldier whom he came to know, pity, and revere. Lewis considered himself an ineffective officer and described himself as moved about by Ayres, who transformed their unequal and awkward roles into something beautiful and became almost a father to him. Lewis believed that Ayres was probably killed by the same shell that wounded him. The war’s significance here is inseparable from this personal relationship: amid military hierarchy and danger, an individual soldier became a source of care and attachment.

Memory, Death, and the Bullet

Lewis’s familiarity with the dead, both long dead and recently killed, confirmed a view of corpses that he traced back to the moment he first saw his dead mother. This link joins wartime experience to the earlier history of bereavement rather than treating the war as an isolated chapter. Yet Lewis also says that many of the war’s frightening and physically harsh details appear only faintly in memory, as if they had happened to someone else. He calls the experience cut off from the rest of his life and, in one sense, unimportant—not because the events were slight, but because recollection has given other moments greater imaginative force.

The moment he singles out is hearing his first bullet. It was distant enough to make the sound seem like the conventional bullet of a journalist or a poet, but the recognition it brought was immediate: this was war, and it belonged to the world written about by Homer. Lewis’s recollection turns a sound into a meeting point between present danger and inherited literature. The Second World War therefore enters the memoir both as an actual ordeal and as an imaginative realization, one whose remembered meaning can outlast the accumulation of events that followed.