By Joseph Laconte
Wednesday, December 25, 2024
Barely 180 days into “the war to end all wars,” the
European states were deadlocked in a conflict more destructive and dehumanizing
than any previous war in the history of the world.
The death toll was already staggering. From August 1914,
when hostilities broke out, until December, most of the British Expeditionary
Force in France, about 160,000 men, had been wiped out. The French and German
armies sustained combat losses of well over 600,000 between them. Nearly
200,000 of Austria’s best troops were dead, another half million wounded. As
Christmas approached, Pope Benedict XV appealed for a temporary truce over the
Christian holiday. It was soundly rejected by the warring governments and their
generals.
Yet the soldiers in the trenches were moved by a force no
one anticipated: an outbreak of humanity that swept through the lines across
the Western Front.
Armies on both sides put down their weapons, sang
Christmas hymns, and came out of their trenches to share food, drinks, and
tobacco. No one ordered the now famous “Christmas truce” of 1914: It arose
spontaneously, among officers as well as ordinary soldiers, along hundreds of
miles of fortified defenses. It was as if some voice deep inside the human soul
— long repressed — had demanded, for a moment, to be heard.
“You could never imagine such a thing,” wrote British
officer Wilbert Spencer. “Both sides came out and met in the middle, shook
hands, wished each other the compliments of the season and had a chat.”
Josef Wenzl, a soldier in the German infantry, wrote to
his parents: “Between the trenches, the hatred and bitter opponents meet around
the Christmas tree and sing Christmas carols. This once in a lifetime vision I
will not forget.”
Within 24 hours the fighting resumed. Before the war was
over, in November 1918, nearly 10 million young men would perish amid the
trenches, the mortars, the barbed wire, and the poison gas. Whatever spirit had
moved the combatants to acknowledge the Prince of Peace was dragged back into
an abyss of industrialized slaughter and desolation.
Much of the courage, confidence, and decency of the West
seemed to vanish with it. “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human
society which a century will not efface,” wrote Winston Churchill in The
World Crisis, “and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present
civilization.”
The most poignant theme that appears in the letters and
diaries of the young people caught up in the conflict is the sense of loss: not
only the grief over friends and intimates who died in battle but also the
loss of time. Richard Aldington, who fought on the Western Front, captured
the mood through the character of Winterbourne in his novel, Death of a
Hero. “These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow
from which he could not possibly recover.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, who served as a second lieutenant in
the BEF in France and fought at the Somme, battled the same emotional
headwinds. “I was pitched into it just when I had things to learn and stuff to
write,” he recalled, “but never picked it all up again.” Tolkien’s longtime
friend, C. S. Lewis, was forced to interrupt his studies at Oxford University
and train as a cadet before being sent to France. “Everyone you met took it for
granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastly interruption of
rational life.”
The suspension of rational life, however, had just begun.
Two profoundly irrational forces took flight in the ashes of the First World
War. The Modernist movement in literature was a pre-war phenomenon, but the
disillusionment in the aftermath of the killing fields of 1914–1918 shattered
all conventional restraints.
Whatever form Modernism took — in art, theater, film, or
literature — the emphasis was on exposing the chaos behind the façade of order,
convention, and rationality. The effect on English literature was profound. In
1922, the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses — in which the concepts of
human agency and morality dissolve into subjectivity — was the literary
equivalent of the splitting of the atom. T. S. Eliot’s great modern poem, The
Waste Land (1922), with its “heap of broken images,” signaled that the old
certainties and virtues were obsolete. As one literary critic described it, a
generation of authors and artists had effectively “checked themselves into a
madhouse.”
This was the temper of the literary establishment as
Tolkien and Lewis were launching their academic careers at Oxford in the 1920s.
They both thought of themselves chiefly as poets, yet they were repulsed by the
Modernist trends in literature. “They thought Eliot was infected with chaos,
rather than fortifying others against it,” explains Oxford scholar Michael
Ward. “Yes, many images were broken, and rightly so. But you couldn’t just live
in an iconoclastic graveyard.”
In their own distinctive ways, Tolkien and Lewis launched
a counterattack — a literary campaign to restore the concepts of good and evil,
of the heroic ideal, yet reinvented for the modern mind. In this task they both
drew inspiration from an older tradition: the classical and medieval
literature, framed by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, that had shaped and
nourished Western civilization.
They faced a truly daunting challenge. The dehumanization
of the individual, a process begun in the mud and blood of the Western Front,
became a distinguishing feature of early 20th-century man. The artist
“confronted the world without any accepted understanding of human life,”
observed journalist Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals (1929). “In
such a world the artist can work only by his recollection of an older universe
in which he has ceased to believe. Of all men, the artist needs God most.”
The irrationality in modern literature, untethered from
traditional religion, had a counterpart in politics. The Great War seemed to
delegitimize the entire liberal democratic project, leaving a cultural vacuum.
New ideologies, as virulent as the influenza epidemic, rushed to fill it. Like
the literati, the leaders of these political projects, in the words of
philosopher Russell Kirk, were “enemies of the permanent things.”
The 1917 Marxist revolution in Russia, waged in the name
of bread, peace, and the proletariat, produced a murderous civil war, mass
starvation, and political dictatorship. At its materialist core was a deep
hatred of religion, “the opiate of the masses.” In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who
swept his Fascist Party into power in 1922, quickly achieved a godlike status
among the Italian population. “The Fascist conception of the State is all
embracing,” Mussolini declared. “Outside of it no human or spiritual values can
exist, much less have value.” In Germany, the embittered loser in the First
World War, copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf first appeared in
bookstores in 1925. In less than a decade, Hitler and his Nazi Party seized
complete control of the German state. The militarization of Germany and the
assault on the Jews as “the bacillus” of humanity began in earnest. Meanwhile,
in Japan, Emperor Hirohito, revered as “a living god,” had assumed absolute
command of the military and launched a brutal war of aggression against China.
Thus, by the 1930s, the most powerful states in Europe
and Asia had enshrined Frederick Nietzche’s doctrine of the Will to Power. Each
drew strength from their hatreds. Each imposed upon their populations utopian
visions of a new world order. As political religions, they demanded the
unquestioning devotion of their citizens, regarded as utensils of the State.
The flight from reason was complete.
It was in the years leading up to the Second World War
that Tolkien and Lewis sought each other out in friendship. Together with other
like-minded authors and friends, the Inklings, they made Oxford an outpost of
resistance against the forces of disintegration that threatened to overwhelm
them.
The years of 1939–1945 — when Great Britain and the West
faced an existential crisis — utterly transformed their lives and literary
imagination. Their most beloved works — including The Hobbit, The
Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, Mere Christianity, and
The Chronicles of Narnia — were conceived in the shadow of this
conflict. Each of their stories exalt the value of individual courage and
sacrifice for a noble cause, regardless of the costs.
“My entire philosophy of history,” Lewis once told
Tolkien, “hangs upon a single sentence of your own.” What sentence? It is from
a passage in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf the Wizard explains to
Frodo Baggins something of the ancient struggle for Middle-earth. “There was
sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that
were not wholly vain.”
Here is an approach to history — to the terrible story of
the 20th century — that invites reflection. The lives of Tolkien and Lewis were
embedded in this history. They possessed a deep awareness of life’s sorrows.
Yet their experience of suffering — and the temptation to cynicism — was held
in check by something stronger: gratitude. Their decision to resist the shadow
of evil that threatened their world was fortified by their love of “the old
books.”
Like the soldiers during the Christmas truce in 1914, J.
R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis unexpectedly unleashed a force of goodness and
grace in one of the blackest moments in world history. In this, they used their
imagination to reclaim — for their generation and for ours — those deeds of
courage and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in
the deepest darkness.
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