C. S. Lewis: A Biography

This, perhaps the worst crisis of the war, galvanized the War Cabinet into action at last. Lloyd George took over the direction of the War Office on 23 March and was soon transporting 30,000 men a day to France. General Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France, had said that he could only hold the Germans for eighteen days without the reserve: Lloyd George got them over to him within a week. Nevertheless, the Allies were not merely retreating, they were disintegrating. On 3 April Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch took over supreme command of the Allied Armies (his position was made official on 14 April) and was slowly able to halt the advance when the Germans were within forty miles of Paris. ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end,’ cried General Haig,

(#ulink_3e25c37d-1b78-5b27-b1c3-973484e6e084) speaking for the British forces of which he was still in supreme command when the second German putsch came (9–25 April) – and the line of defence stretched without breaking. General Ludendorff, the German chief of staff, drew back slowly and sullenly towards ultimate defeat.

During the First Battle of Arras, from 21 to 28 March 1918, Lewis was in or near the front line. ‘Until the great German attack came in the spring we had a pretty quiet time,’ he recorded in Surprised by Joy.

Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely ‘keeping us quiet’ by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day … Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire … I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war – the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet – all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.

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Still in the area around Arras, Lewis next saw action in the Battle of Hazebrouck, from 12 to 15 April. The particular phase of that great battle in which he took part centred on Riez du Vinage. Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between 14 and 16 April:

The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols ascertained that the enemy was holding Riez du Vinage, a small wooded village north of the canon and north-east of Mt Bernenchon … As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on 14 April], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Cacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad!’ and were made prisoners.

When dawn broke on the 15th a considerable number of Germans in full marching order were seen: they were advancing in twos and threes into shell holes from houses north and north-east of Riez and from the northern end of Bois de Pacaut. Heavy rifle fire and Lewis-gun fire was opened on them, serious casualties being inflicted, and if a serious counter-attack was intended it was definitely broken up, for no further action was taken by the evening: his stretcher bearers were busy for the rest of the day.

About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men … a little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets … About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down …

The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.

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Lewis was wounded by an English shell exploding behind him. (‘Hence the greeting of an aunt,’ wrote Lewis, ‘who said, with obvious relief, “Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!”’)

(#ulink_d3920d4e-0528-597a-b411-99d24fe3beb1) He was able to write a few lines to his father on 17 April, to say that he was in the ‘Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital, Etaples – Getting on all right but can’t write properly yet as my left arm is still tied up and it’s hard to manage with one.’

(#ulink_ba3bcd9d-783f-5ce4-9069-9d1eac5b9181) And on 14 May: ‘I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case … In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my “pigeon chest” … this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.’

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When the Army medical records were released many years later, the Proceedings of the Medical Board assembled by order of the GOC London District described Lewis’s wounds thus:

The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated – there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.

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On 25 May 1918 Lewis arrived by stretcher at Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London. His first act was to send his father a telegram. Lewis was out of the war, though he did not yet know it. ‘I am sitting up in bed in the middle of a red sunset to answer this evening’s letter straightaway,’ he wrote to Arthur on 29 May. ‘I am in a vastly comfortable hospital, where we are in separate rooms and have tea in the morning and big broad beds and every thing the heart of man could desire; and best of all, in close communication with all the bookshops of London.’

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It is at this point in Lewis’s life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties. When about to describe his return to Oxford in January 1919, Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: ‘But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even if I were free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of this book.’

(#ulink_d479086d-676c-508c-804c-ee8090fecd2b) In a more civilized age this would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs. But as so many of Lewis’s most personal letters and papers have been published or are available in public collections, we have no choice but to follow up all the available evidence as far as it will take us.

It does not, in fact, take us very far. Early ‘hostility to the emotions’, aggravated by his (perhaps exaggerated) revulsion against the unsavoury perversions at Malvern, made Lewis excessively wary of ‘the lusts of the flesh’. While he discussed these matters freely with Arthur Greeves, and after his conversion spoke of his early sins with understandable detestation (we may add, with perhaps some exaggeration hovering between a touch of subconscious pride at his regeneration and a very real gratitude to God for helping him to achieve it), the available material gives absolutely no concrete evidence of lapses from chastity in the stricter sense.

Undoubtedly Lewis ‘fell in love’ once or twice in his youth and early manhood, just as naturally as he felt carnal desire for the dancing mistress at Cherbourg – or the various other women whose physical charms, or the lack of them, he discussed with Greeves. Even during the terrible stress of his fifteen months in the Army, several of them with death imminent and probable, he apparently did not waste his pay ‘on prostitutes, restaurants and tailors, as the gentiles do’.

(#ulink_8d7e3e2b-2cc1-5e01-9189-41a97d2089f3) And none of the more serious love-affairs that he mentions or suggests in letters and diaries seem to have progressed very far.

The only really overwhelming ‘love-affair’ of his early life, and that to which he may well be referring in Surprised by Joy, was of a kind and took so surprising a turn that it can hardly be classified with the ordinary ‘lusts of the flesh’. His affection for Mrs Moore – his infatuation, as it seemed to his friends and even to his brother who knew him more intimately than any of them – may have started with that incomprehensible passion which attractive middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths: but it very soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute – in many ways a father-substitute also.

When Lewis had been ordered to the front and had telegraphed to his father to come and spend his last day in England with him, Albert Lewis had indeed ‘misunderstood’ the telegram and not come. It might have been a genuine misunderstanding. But in June 1918, when he lay wounded in hospital in London, Lewis wrote several times begging his father to visit him: ‘Come and see me,’ he wrote on 20 June. ‘I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.’

(#ulink_b21c10ef-85b1-5f7b-8084-255d6f8287fa) Warnie later wrote:

One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.

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Lewis was moved from London towards the end of July, to a convalescent home in Ashton Court near Clifton, Bristol, which he chose as it was near Mrs Moore – and there were difficulties in the way of getting into one in Northern Ireland. He was supposed to be there for only two months, but an outbreak of infectious disease which caused the home to be isolated, and his own unexpectedly slow recovery from his wounds, kept him there until mid-October, when he was posted to Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire.

Paddy Moore, who had been with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, had taken part in resisting the great German attack which began on 21 March 1918. He had last been seen on the morning of 24 March, and by September 1918 he was known to have died at Pargny on that day.

(#ulink_db55051d-44b9-58ad-bba1-fbebf053f65c) When definite news of his death had come through Albert Lewis wrote to commiserate. Mrs Moore replied on 1 October 1918: ‘I just lived my life for my son, and it is very hard to go on now … Of the five boys who came out to us so often at Oxford, Jack is the only one left. I feel that I can never do enough for those that are left. Jack has been so good to me. My poor son asked him to look after me if he did not come back. He possesses for a boy of his age such a wonderful power of understanding and sympathy.’

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Meanwhile Lewis’s first literary venture was taking shape. The embarkation leave in October 1917 had been so curtailed by illness that he was probably able to do little in the way of assembling and copying out his poems during his visit to Belfast. But as soon as he was able to do so in the hospital in London, he set to work on preparing a fair copy that could be typed and sent to a publisher – now with several recent poems to add to those written during the Bookham and Oxford periods – and continued to do so even more industriously when he got to Ashton Court. On 12 September, Lewis wrote to Greeves from Mrs Moore’s home in Ravenswood Road, Bristol:

The best of news! After keeping my MS. for ages Heinemann has actually accepted it … You can imagine how pleased I am, and how eagerly I now look at all Heinemann’s books and wonder what mine will be like. I’m afraid the paper will be poor as it always is now in new books. It is going to be called ‘Spirits in Prison’ by Clive Staples and is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before – that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.

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On 6 October he was writing to Arthur from Pelham Downs Camp, Ludgershall (near Andover): ‘No, you were wrong, I have not gone on my leave; I was only out for a night at Mrs Moore’s. I have now, however, had my Board, over a month late I’m glad to say, and have been sent for further convalescence to a camp here.’

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‘It is terrible to think how quickly an old order changes and how impossible it is to build it up again exactly the same,’ he wrote on 2 November 1918.

I wonder will there be many changes when we meet again? Maureen told me the other day that I was greatly changed since she first knew me, but, with the impenetrable reticence of a child, declined to say in what way … Imade a journey to London to see Heinemanns.

(#ulink_50418f25-5e30-5377-aca9-1c4418ab8bb1)C.S. Evans, the manager, was very nice to me and quite enthusiastic about the book and especially about one piece. John Galsworthy, he said, had read the MS. and wanted to put this piece in a new Quarterly which he is bringing out for disabled soldiers and sailors called Reveille: of course I consented … So at last dreams come to pass and I have sat in the sanctum of a publisher discussing my own book.

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Spirits in Bondage (the name was changed on account of A Spirit in Prison (1908) by Robert Hichens) was delayed in publication on account of a shortage of cloth for binding, and did not come out until 20 March 1919, after the appearance of ‘Death in Battle’ in the February number of Reveille – Lewis’s first publication, other than contributions to school magazines. He was in good company in the third number of Reveille, which included poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Hilaire Belloc; his own poem appeared under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’ on which he had finally decided – his own Christian name and his mother’s maiden name.

It received no special attention (‘graceful and polished’, said The Times; ‘the work is strongly imagined and never unhealthy, trifling or affected’, according to the Scotsman), and Lewis seems to have been rather unduly disappointed. He certainly almost ceased writing lyrics, but turned back none the less to his real literary love, the long narrative poem. While Spirits in Bondage was still in the press he was writing to Greeves (on 2 December 1918, from Officers’ Command Depot, Eastbourne, to which he had been moved a couple of weeks earlier): ‘I have just finished a short narrative, which is a verse version of our old friend “Dymer”, greatly reduced and altered to my new ideas. The main idea is that of development by self-destruction, both of individuals and species … I am also at work on a short blank verse scene (you can hardly call it a play) between Tristram and King Mark, and a poem on Ion, which is a failure so far.’

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There is no further reference to either the Arthurian or the classical poem, and Dymer in any form seems soon to have been set aside, not to be resumed until 1922.

For great changes were coming, though they threw no shadows before. On 8 December, Lewis wrote to his father: ‘As you have probably seen in the papers, we are all going to get 12 days “Christmas leave”. I use the inverted commas advisedly, as mine seems likely to be in January … I see that we are not to be “discharged”, but “demobilized” and kept on the leash for the rest of our lives.’

(#ulink_74fa80e2-578e-56dc-88ae-201c0d978937) His fear was of being kept in ‘Class Z Reserve’, as he had volunteered and not been conscripted; but physical unfitness due to his wounds procured him a complete discharge. Over twenty years later the piece of shrapnel had to be removed from his chest, and a further result of his experiences at the front seems to have been a ‘distressing weakness’ of the bladder from which he suffered for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile Warnie, who had been in France all this time, and promoted to captain on 29 November, returned to Belfast on leave on 23 December, bitterly disappointed to find that he had once again missed seeing his brother, since their leaves would not overlap. But he was able to record in his diary for 27 December: ‘A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jack! He has been demobilized, thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit … In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event: the first time I have ever had champagne at home.’