John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

Light as a tangible substance (often a liquid) was to become a recurrent feature of Tolkien’s mythology. It is tempting to locate its origin here. It is noteworthy, too, that the Two Trees of Valinor, which were to illumine his created world, had their progenitors here in a poem celebrating his relationship with Edith and in his symbolic drawing Undertenishness.

Both Smith and Wade-Gery also favoured a poem written in March called ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’, in which Tolkien took a well-known nursery rhyme and retold it at length. The original version is nonsensical:

The man in the moon

came down too soon,

And asked the way to Norwich;

He went by the south

And burned his mouth

With supping cold plum porridge.

Tolkien’s retelling makes sense of the story (thankfully, without sacrificing any of its absurdity). The Man in the Moon acquires both personality and motive, leaving his chill and colourless lunar kingdom because he craves the exuberance of the Earth. In counterpoint to the ‘viands hot, and wine’ the Man in the Moon desires, his accustomed diet of ‘pearly cakes of light snowflakes’ and ‘thin moonshine’ sounds royally unsatisfying. Grandiose latinisms embellish the Man in the Moon’s vain imaginings until he is brought down to earth with a bump – or rather a splash. With the help of some deliciously pithy images (‘his round heart nearly broke’), the blunter Germanic words help to win him some sympathy.

He twinkled his feet as he thought of the meat,

Of the punch and the peppery stew,

Till he tripped unaware on his slanting stair,

And fell like meteors do;

As the whickering sparks in splashing arcs

Of stars blown down like rain

From his laddery path took a foaming bath

In the Ocean of Almain.

Tolkien is seen at play in the English language. To twinkle is to move with a flutter (the Oxford English Dictionary cites a dance, the twinkle-step, in 1920), but appropriately it is also to glimmer like stars; whickering is the sound of something hurtling through air, but aptly enough it is also sniggering laughter. Of course, the Man in the Moon’s adventure ends ignominiously. He is fished out by trawlermen who take him to Norwich, where, instead of a royal welcome, in exchange for his jewels and ‘faerie cloak’ he gets merely a bowl of gruel.

The poem is a fine example of Tolkien’s lightness of touch and as a piece of comic verse marks a great step from the merely parodic ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’. At first it was not connected with the mythological world then being sketched out in the Qenya lexicon; but (as Tom Shippey has pointed out) the extraction of a whole story from six lines of nursery nonsense shows the same fascination with reconstructing the true tales behind garbled survivals that powered Tolkien’s myth-making.

Smith welcomed the arrival of another poet in the TCBS and had sent the poems on to Gilson by the end of March. To both John Ronald and Rob he also despatched copies of his own work, a long Arthurian piece called ‘Glastonbury’ he had written for Oxford University’s annual Newdigate Prize and described as ‘the most TCBSian mosaic of styles and seasons’. *

There was another abortive attempt to arrange a TCBS meeting, this time in Oxford, where Tolkien would play host at St John Street. It seemed, perhaps, the only way to guarantee his involvement, but just ahead of the appointed date G. B. Smith wrote to say that the ‘Council of Oxford’ was off: he was at home on sick leave and caught up in a whirlwind attempt to leave the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry so that he and Tolkien could be soldiers together.

The battalion had taken him on as a ‘supernumerary’ in December 1914 because its officer quota was full. It would certainly have no vacancy for Tolkien when he finished Schools. Accordingly, Smith had decided to transfer with Wade-Gery, his favourite among the officers, into another battalion. ‘I suppose I have your approval?’ he wrote to Tolkien on Easter Monday. An acquaintance at the War Office arranged the transfer to the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers, which was training at Penmaenmawr on Conwy Bay in North Wales. When all was fixed, Smith had to face another week with his existing battalion during which, he said, he would ‘think often of the TCBS, possibly to the strains of a Court-Martial’.

He warned, though, that there could be no guarantees of a commission in his new battalion for Tolkien, but advised him, ‘You can be sure of getting somewhere in the Army I think, unless things have collapsed by June.’ If the war was still under way, Smith said, he could recommend battalions in which his life would not be at great risk and Tolkien could save up to £50 a year for his fiancée. ‘I can’t help thinking that your prospects afterwards would be improved,’ he added, ‘unless you could snap up a good thing [a civilian job] at once in June, in which case I should advise you to take it, and let the old country go hang. You can always join a volunteer defence corps, to make your mind easy.’

Smith and Wade-Gery were among a set of ‘other literary Oxford lights’ who, as Rob Gilson put it, ‘had gone in a body to officer the Lancashire Fusiliers’. The move perhaps reflected the mood of ‘mucking in together’ by people from all walks of life, very different from the rancour and industrial class-strife that had preceded the war. For the battalion Smith was joining was known informally as the 3rd Salford Pals and had just been formed in an industrial suburb of Manchester. *Its rank and file were drawn from towns of the East Lancashire coalfield. The Oxford University men duly took their place as officers beside the bankers and businessmen of Eccles, Swinton, and Salford. The ‘Pals’ battalions, such as those in Birmingham which Hilary Tolkien, T. K. Barnsley, and Ralph Payton had joined, emerged from the parochial pride and close-knit friendships within English towns and villages, especially in the North: recruits would be largely drummed up en masse from a single place, and groups of friends would be encouraged to join together. It could be a haphazard process: the 3rd Salford Pals consisted of men who had been meant for another Salford unit but had missed the train.

The Lancashire Fusiliers had a fine reputation dating back to the landing of William of Orange in England in 1688, and in the Seven Years War its infantry had shattered the charge of the supposedly invincible French cavalry at Minden. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington described it as ‘the best and most distinguished’ of British regiments. Most recently, during the Boer War, the Lancashire Fusiliers had suffered the heaviest casualties in the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, but had gone on to the relief of Ladysmith.

When G. B. Smith joined the 19th Battalion, the regiment had just etched its name bloodily and tragically in the history books again. As the Oxford term began, on Sunday 25 April 1915, the British-Anzac assault was launched at Gallipoli against the Turkish allies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The day was a foretaste of thirty-seven weeks to come: a disastrously unequal fight, with British and Anzac troops wading ashore under cruel cliffs surmounted by wire and machine-gun posts. Nevertheless, the worn word ‘hero’ was being reforged in galvanizing fires. In the forefront of the assault, the Lancashire Fusiliers rowed into a hail of bullets at ‘W Beach’ on Cape Helles. As they leapt from their boats, seventy pounds of equipment dragged many of the injured to death by drowning. On reaching the shore, others foundered on the barbed wire, which a preceding naval bombardment had failed to break. The beach was secured that day but 260 of the 950 attacking Fusiliers were killed and 283 wounded. In the eyes of many at home, however, the regiment covered itself in glory, and eventually it reaped a historic six Victoria Crosses for that morning on the beach.