Tolkien and the Great War (14 page)

The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a ‘wistful song of things that were, and could be
yet'. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in ‘Kortirion' but an acceptance approaching contentment.

The mood is most apparent in the poem's sense of rootedness. In contrast to Éarendel or the envious figure in ‘The Happy Mariners', the voice hymning Kortirion concludes that it has no desire for adventure:

I need not know the desert or red palaces Where dwells the sun, the great seas or the magic isles,

The pinewoods piled on mountain-terraces…

The sentiment is central to Tolkien's character. Later, when he had put the years of enforced wandering behind him, he rarely travelled far except in his imagination. It was landscape and climate more than political statehood that fired his idea of nationalism. The spirit of place, so potent in Tolkien's mythology, seems to have emerged fully fledged just as the subaltern poet was swept into a life outdoors and on the move: his eye was sharpened, but so was his longing for home, which Warwick had come to embody. Stray workings for this latest poem (relating to the army of winter) suggest that he may have begun the poem shortly after arriving at Penkridge Camp, with its grey waste, its boredom and its grind. But Tolkien created the Elf-haunted town of Kortirion from life when, following army inoculations, he spent a
week of frost
and clear skies with Edith in Warwick. On his return to camp, he sent her a copy of the poem and then wrote out another, despatching it at the end of November to Rob Gilson for circulation among the TCBS.

‘
I am now 21
years of age, and cannot help doubting whether I shall ever be 22,' G. B. Smith had written from Salisbury Plain in mid-October. ‘Our departure for France is almost within sight. The King is going to inspect us shortly. I hope he will be duly impressed by this member of the TCBS.' The Salford Pals were waiting to move out along with eleven other battalions, including Ralph Payton's and Hilary Tolkien's, all of which
belonged to a single vast army division encamped around Codford St Mary. In November, Smith worked hard to finish a long poem of his own, ‘The Burial of Sophocles', before embarkation. He rushed home to West Bromwich to say goodbye to his widowed mother and dined at Codford for the last time with Gilson, who wrote: ‘It is impossible for us to tell him all the hopes and wishes and prayers that the first TCBSite to set forth carries with him…I feel that this is a memorable day in TCBSian history.'

The day had already come for some of those who had belonged to the TCBS before the Council of London. Sidney
Barrowclough
had sailed with the Royal Field Artillery in September for Salonica, the staging-post for British troops fighting in the Balkans. T. K. Barnsley, who had switched his ambitions from the Methodist ministry to professional soldiering, was now in the trenches with the élite Coldstream Guards, having transferred from the Warwickshires in August. Smith, waiting to go as the first of the ‘foursquare' TCBS, wrote to Tolkien:

We are now so pledged
to see the matter through, that no reasoning or thinking about it will do anything except waste time and undermine resolution. I often thought that we should be put to the fiery trial: the time is almost upon us. If we emerge, we emerge victorious, if not, I hope I shall be proud to die for my country and the TCBS. But who knows what is hidden in the black darkness between now and the spring? It is the most anxious hour of my life.

On 21 November 1915, in rain and biting wind, Lieutenant G. B. Smith paraded at the head of his platoon on the Wiltshire downs and then took the train to Southampton. After a night crossing to Le Havre, shadowed by a British destroyer, Smith and the Salford Pals marched off the blacked-out troop ship
Princess Caroline
onto beleaguered French soil.

On 2 December, following a week of route marches, GBS wrote from the front to say that he had visited the trenches ‘to the peril of neither body or soul'. He was cheerful, if somewhat
overworked. Far more distressing to him than the trenches was the fact that somewhere on the journey he had lost his great poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles'. Military censorship prevented him from pinpointing his position, but in fact he was in Albert, near the River Somme, an area that would become darkly familiar to Tolkien and notorious in history.

Ever since joining the army in July, Tolkien had turned his attention away from Kôr and the Otherworld over the sea and had focused on Kortirion and mortal lands, where the elves are a fading, elusive ‘shadow-people'. But Tolkien's wartime poem ‘
Habbanan beneath the Stars
' was peopled by the figures of men and was set neither in England nor in Aryador. He later recalled that it was written either at Brocton Camp in December 1915, or the following June in the massive transit camp at Étaples on the French coast. Either way, it seems apt that the poem should depict an encampment of men.

There is a sound of faint guitars

And distant echoes of a song,

For there men gather into rings

Round their red fires while one voice sings -

And all about is night.

The Qenya lexicon describes Habbanan simply as ‘a region on the borders of Valinor', and prior to the post-war
‘Lost Tales'
there is no further elucidation of its significance.

But there is a spiritual and religious dimension to Tolkien's world, never absent though rarely blatant, that was notably pronounced in his original conceptions. Side by side with terms for different Elvish tribes in the lexicon are words for ‘saint', ‘monastery', and ‘crucifixion', ‘nun', ‘gospel', and ‘Christian missionary'. There is even a Qenya aphorism,
perilmë metto aimaktur perperienta
, ‘We indeed endure things but the martyrs endured and to the end' – an interesting perspective from a member of the Great War generation. The Valar who rule
Valinor, or ‘Asgard', are only gods in pagan eyes: in reality they are angels under ‘God Almighty, the creator who dwells without the world'. Although Tolkien later refined this religious element, and in
The Lord of the Rings
made it all but invisible to the inattentive eye, he never removed it from his conception of Middle-earth.

The religious dimension helps to explain how the elves could come to ‘teach men song and holiness'. Tolkien's conviction at this time appears not to have been far different from the view he propounded later in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories': that although myths and fairy-tales contradicted the Christian story, they were not lies. Because they were the work of human beings ‘subcreating' in emulation of their own Creator, he felt that they must contain seeds of the truth. The idea was not entirely new, and had been expressed the other way round by G. K. Chesterton in his 1908 essay ‘The Ethics of Elfland': ‘
I had always
felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.' Before Christ, in Tolkien's benighted Aryador, myth and Faërie would have been as close to that truth as the wandering peoples of Europe could attain. The Elvish religious mission, then, can be seen as a metaphor for the enlightening impact of fairy-stories.

In literal terms, however, the Elves come from Kôr, which abuts the land of the Valar: they have lived alongside the angels. Tolkien's synthesis of human supernatural beliefs is staggeringly ambitious. Habbanan, which also borders Valinor, is the place ‘where all roads end however long' this side of Heaven itself. It is a vision, perhaps, to console those facing death: the Christian purgatory seen through a faëry glass.

There on a sudden did my heart perceive

That they who sang about the Eve,

Who answered the bright-shining stars

With gleaming music of their strange guitars,

These were His wandering happy sons

Encamped upon those aëry leas

Where God's unsullied garment runs

In glory down His mighty knees.

Tolkien had always been fascinated by
codes and alphabets
, and in his teens had made many of his own – the beginning of a lifelong passion. Once in the army, he decided to specialize in signals, in which cryptography played a small part. Training would be more interesting and he would be playing to his strengths, putting his unusual aptitudes at the army's disposal. Consciously or otherwise, he was also boosting his chances of surviving the war, which would be poor indeed at the head of a routine patrol or an attacking platoon in No Man's Land. It is a strange thought that, without such decisions, children might never have heard of Bilbo Baggins, or Winnie-the-Pooh either, for that matter: elsewhere in the army, a subaltern called A. A.
Milne
also opted to be a signaller quite consciously to save his skin. But Milne also called signalling ‘much the most interesting work in the infantry, with the great advantage that one is the only officer in the Battalion who knows anything about it, and is consequently one's own master – a great thing to a civilian in the Army'.

By late December 1915, when the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers had shifted from Penkridge Camp to the neighbouring Brocton Camp, Tolkien was engrossed in cryptanalytic exercises and scribbling his workings on the backs of envelopes. But of course signalling was not just about making and breaking codes. The more mechanical aspect of the job dealt with ways of transmitting the coded message, and so Tolkien learned how to signal to an observer with semaphore flags, or with Morse ‘dots' and
‘dashes' flashed out with a lamp by night or with a heliograph by day. For longer-distance work, or for times when flashing a light was inadequate or dangerous, he had to master the use and maintenance of a field telephone. The other two items in his armoury were rather less sophisticated: rockets and carrier pigeons. He also learned map-reading and took part in the usual military manoeuvres on Cannock Chase. It was a bitter place to call home in the middle of winter, and he was miserable.

Rob Gilson's fears of being sent to France or Flanders had been banished before Christmas by rumours that they were off to Egypt and by the issuing of desert kit.
‘Imagine the general rejoicing at the awakening from our long nightmare of the cold, wet, muddy, and worst of all, the ragtime, trenches,'
he wrote to Tolkien on Boxing Day. But that day the Cambridgeshires had been ordered to relinquish their sun-helmets, and their hopes. ‘The whole world looks gray again. It is worse than ever for the sunny dream that has intervened.'

Gilson soon rallied. His long anguish over Estelle King had come to an end. His stepmother
Donna
, learning that Estelle wished to see him before he left, had brought them face to face for the first time since his disastrous April proposal. At the end of November, Gilson had renewed his petition and she had returned his love. Proud and head-over-heels, he desperately wanted to tell his friends but refrained at the request of Estelle, whose parents still forbade any formal engagement. However, she heard all about the TCBS, and when ‘
Kortirion
among the Trees' reached Gilson on Salisbury Plain he promised he would one day show her Tolkien's poetry. As 1916 came in he told her: ‘
What a wonderful year!
I expected nothing but wretchedness and I have found—! I wish I were a poet and then I might be able to express myself.'

The same day Christopher Wiseman, now a naval officer with two gold stripes on his arm, reported for duty in Scotland, where he joined the HMS
Superb
at Invergordon on 2 January.
‘Then I plunge myself into the middle of 870 other mortals, about whom I know nothing, and who know and care nothing about me,'
he had written to Tolkien. His arrival was more alarming
than he feared. The battleship was berthed with its squadron in Cromarty Firth, where a mysterious explosion had just sunk an armoured cruiser, killing more than three hundred seamen. Amid suspicions that a German submarine was hunting in the Firth, the big ships were ringed by their torpedo nets, which hung suspended forty feet out from the vessels' flanks. To board the
Superb
, Wiseman had to climb up a rope ladder and along the boom straddling the shielded gap.

Gilson was promoted to lieutenant and sailed for France on 8 January 1916 – the same day, coincidentally, that Estelle King took ship for Holland as a volunteer nurse. He wrote to her:
‘I wish I could describe or draw for you the lovely sunrise we watched this morning from the train – like one of the Bellinis in the National Gallery, with Salisbury Plain standing up against the sky, bounded by a lovely velvety black line…It is a long time since I have felt the sheer beauty of things so strongly. It really seems for the moment more like a holiday
.' He promised that, when the war was over, they would travel to his beloved Italy together. He carried with him a New Testament and the
Odyssey
, both in Greek.

Tolkien had just turned twenty-four. In the space of seven weeks, all three of his dearest friends had gone to war. In the midst of it all,
Oxford Poetry 1915
had been published, containing his poem ‘Goblin Feet'. A thousand copies were printed, and it marked the first time a piece of his writing had reached a wider audience than school or college.

A critic in the
Oxford Magazine
reflected that no Pope or Tennyson held sway now: ‘The idols have fallen…The pedestal stands empty.' Some of the poets were exploring new modes of expression, such as
vers libre
, and new subjects, such as motorbikes and (in the case of T. W. Earp of Exeter College) mechanical cranes, the anonymous reviewer noted approvingly; and he was pleased to see that the old conventions of love poetry, the language of ‘christal eyes and cherrie lippes', had been exhausted.

From France, G. B. Smith opined vigorously that the reviewer
ought to be shot. ‘
The truth is
,' he told Tolkien, ‘that everything which is prosaic and noisy passes nowadays as being clever.' He assured Tolkien that ‘Goblin Feet' read splendidly, though he added that it was far from being his best work. More than two weeks later, on 12 January, Smith was still cursing that ‘terrible fellow' Earp. By that time Gilson had forwarded ‘Kortirion' to him. Smith was living in a trench dugout and had been attached to a battalion of professional soldiers for instruction;
^*
he was feeling lost and incompetent, he said, but was uplifted by Tolkien's ‘great and noble poem'. He wrote:

I carry your last verses…about with me like a treasure…You know as well as I do, my dear John Ronald, that I don't care a damn if the Bosch drops half-a-dozen high explosives all round and on top of this dugout I am writing in, so long as people go on making verses about ‘Kortirion among the Trees' and such other topics – that indeed is why I am here, to keep them and preserve them…

After eighteen months' anticipation, Rob Gilson had his first taste of the trenches on 2 February a few miles south of Armentières, in the lowland of canals and poplars near the Belgian border. ‘
It is a strange and dreary
looking place – wasteland and shattered trees and houses,' he told Estelle. ‘What most impresses me at first is the appalling expenditure of human labour on merely hiding each other from each other's devilishness. I had never grasped it with my imagination. It is one of the very saddest sights I have ever seen.' At one point Gilson had an absurd vision of his younger self – the cultured and fastidious undergraduate who had thought ‘the real business of life' was touring Normandy churches with a sketchbook – seeing the soldier he had now become crawling on his belly in a French
field on a wet winter's night. Out in the middle of No Man's Land, he had to suppress a guffaw.

The same week, and fifty miles away, Smith (now back with his own battalion) faced patrol with the benefit of neither comedy nor novelty. He had spent half the ten weeks since reaching France either in the trenches or close behind them, but this was the worst stretch of line the Salford Pals had experienced. A hundred yards of the frontline trench, together with all the protecting barbed wire, had been blown in during heavy bombardment just before they arrived. They had to post men in shell holes to guard the line while going out again and again under cover of darkness to put up new wire. Enemy patrols were on the prowl every night and there had been clashes: an officer who was leading a British scouting party on 2 February had attacked with grenades and gunfire but had been wounded. The next day the battalion's bombing officer led another group out and did not come back.

‘A good friend of mine has been wounded on patrol and captured by the Germans. God knows if he is still living,'
Smith wrote as he prepared to set out into No Man's Land that night. Face to face with death, he urged Tolkien,

My dear John Ronald, publish by all means. I am a wild and whole-hearted admirer, and my chief consolation is, that if I am scuppered to-night – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS. Death is so close to me now that I feel – and I am sure you feel, and all the three other heroes feel, how impuissant it is. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!…

Yes, publish – write to Sidgwick and Jackson or who you will. You I am sure are chosen, like Saul among the Children of Israel. Make haste, before you come out to this orgy of death and cruelty…

May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say
the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.

Patrols went out with blackened faces, armed like thieves with clubs and knives, and would crawl along at a rate of perhaps forty yards an hour until they had covered their allotted stretch of No Man's Land. Smith returned safely with all three of his men that night, having seen and heard nothing of the enemy, and lived to lead further patrols. Later, a Turkish flag was hoisted above the enemy trench: clearly the Germans had learned from their captive that they faced the Lancashire Fusiliers and aimed to discomfort them with a reminder of their fruitless losses at Gallipoli. But Smith's captured friend, a nineteen-year-old called Arthur Dixon, was never seen again; he died the next day of wounds sustained during the encounter in No Man's Land and was buried behind German lines.

Within a week Tolkien wrote to Smith announcing that he had submitted his collection of poems,
The Trumpets of Faërie
, to Sidgwick & Jackson. Smith cautioned him not to raise his hopes, and when he realized that ‘Kortirion' had not been submitted pressed him to send it off. ‘I remember how your first verses perplexed me,' Smith wrote. ‘I am glad to say I see now that my criticism of them was just.'

‘Kortirion' was taken to heart by all the TCBS. Ever the most hesitant, Rob Gilson suggested it had ‘
too many precious stones
' but said the poem had frequently cheered him up during hours of dull routine. But Christopher Wiseman wholeheartedly shared Smith's view. ‘
I am immensely braced
with it,' he wrote in February from the
Superb
, now with the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. ‘You seem to have got out of underground caverns full of stalactites lit up with magnesium wire…I used to be afraid you would never write anything but freak poetry, however clever it might be, and however beautiful the effect…But Kortirion seems to me to be as “John Ronaldian” as ever, but less “freakish”.'

Prior to this breakthrough, in other words, Tolkien had been labouring, with too much artifice, after the strange and the unfamiliar. Wiseman was right about the breakthrough. There are qualitative differences between ‘Kortirion among the Trees' and – to take a quartet of 1915 poems that mark four points on the Tolkienian compass – the formal ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon'; the faery ‘Goblin Feet'; the heraldic ‘Shores of Faëry'; and the psychological ‘Happy Mariners'. The first of the four is a virtuoso metrical and verbal performance built around a slight joke: an accomplished piece of light entertainment. The second is a generic faëry piece, standing self-consciously apart from the mainstream: it looks like an act of defiance against the stylistic experimentation and quotidian subject-matter that dominated
Oxford Poetry 1915.
The third is startling, to be sure, but less like a piece of literature than a symbolist painting (which is how it started), with stark emblems and strange names unmediated by commentary or characterization. The fourth, paralysed, fearful, and introspective, suggests a deeply troubled state of mind. Each of these poems might be described as ‘freakish' in its way.

‘Kortirion' follows each of these four directions to some extent, but largely avoids their pitfalls. Like the earlier ‘Man in the Moon' it is technically brilliant, but it is not the case that ‘
there was more form
than content about it', as R. W. Reynolds said of the later poem: its expansive structure allows its symbolic core to be explored from all angles, and gives breathing-space for meditation and the modulation of feeling. ‘Kortirion' is a generic piece of faëry writing like ‘Goblin Feet', but it also embraces the broader tradition of English landscape writing. Like ‘The Shores of Faëry', it depicts mysterious peoples and places, but the brush-strokes are intimate and naturalistic, the invitation to explore is more enticing, and the location is real. Finally, like ‘The Happy Mariners', ‘Kortirion' may be seen as a window onto a psychological state, but now the claustrophobia is banished, the mind expands, and the mood moves towards reconciliation with reality, ‘a haunting ever-near content' with the fading year.

Understandably, Tolkien was hurt to hear his best friend apparently dismiss the bulk of his work as ‘freakish'. He accused Wiseman of a lack of sympathy with his primary inspirations: the glory of the night, the twilight and stars. Wiseman returned that Tolkien failed to appreciate ‘the grandeur of the glare of the noon'. They were talking in metaphors: Tolkien's imagination was fired by vast mysteries and remote beauty, but Wiseman was enthralled by the human endeavour unravelling the riddles of the universe. The argument drew a dividing line between the medievalist, mystical, Catholic Tolkien and the rationalist, humanist, Methodist Wiseman. But Wiseman relished the fight.
‘Old days, Harborne Road and Broad Street again,'
he wrote. ‘A grand old quarrel!…Such openness in speech is what has kept the TCBS together for so long.' He now confessed to long-suppressed reservations about Tolkien's entire project: