From the trenches of Artois to the Pevensie children: how two wars opened the wardrobe

The very first sentence of Narnia speaks of children sent away from London because of air raids. Behind it, there are two wars: one of a wounded sub-lieutenant in northern France, and another of a forty-year-old professor who became the voice of a bombed country.

The evacuees

Des écolières avec leurs valises et leurs étiquettes arrivent devant une maison de campagne en 1939

Un microphone ancien dans un studio de radio de 1941 éclairé par une lampe — The BBC microphone

1939: London schoolgirls arrive at the Kilns, and Lewis begins writing the start of a story.
1917-1918: Sub-lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, wounded on April 15, 1918 at Mont-Bernanchon.
1941-1944: Four series of talks on BBC and lectures at RAF bases.
The war permeates The Screwtape Letters, The Weight of Glory, That Hideous Strength, and Narnia.

The first sentence from 1939

In September 1939, England evacuated children from cities threatened by bombing. The Kilns, Lewis's home near Oxford, hosted several schoolgirls from London. Lewis, who had no children and barely knew them, discovered their curiosity and was surprised by their lack of imagination. It was at this time that he wrote the beginning of a story: four children evacuated to an old professor's house. He abandoned it, then took it up again ten years later. It would become The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens precisely with children “sent away from London because of air raids.”

To understand what this sentence carries, we must go back twenty years earlier.

Going back: the soldier of 1917

Irish, Lewis was not subject to conscription. Yet he enlisted in 1917, through the Oxford Officer Training Corps. As a sub-lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, he arrived on the front line in northern France on November 29, 1917, his nineteenth birthday. He endured the winter in the trenches, trench fever which sent him to the hospital, and then the German offensive in spring. On April 15, 1918, at Mont-Bernanchon, a British shell fell short and wounded him in the chest, hand, and leg, killing his sergeant. His friend Paddy Moore was killed the same year. We tell this French period in detail in “Lewis on the French Side: War, Translations, Readers.”

Lewis would speak little of it. In Surprised by Joy, he devotes a few pages to the war: the cold, the mud, the men “like squashed beetles,” but also camaraderie and his admiration for simple soldiers. He kept a horror of war and a distrust of grand speeches. His first book, the poetry collection Spirits in Bondage (1919), was that of a young atheist returned from the front.

1939: studying when the world burns

In October 1939, Lewis preached a famous sermon to Oxford students, Learning in War-Time. Why study poetry when Rome burns? Because human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice, he replies; war does not create the situation, it makes it visible. We must continue to seek the true and the beautiful, if only to keep the mind from falling into the hands of propagandists.

The Lewis brothers under uniform

Lewis joined the Home Guard, the territorial guard, and patrolled Oxford once a week at night, rifle on his shoulder. Warnie, a career officer, was recalled in 1939 and sent to France. Evacuated in 1940 during the debacle, he was returned to civilian life and then patrolled the Thames with his small pleasure boat, in a volunteer unit.

On screen

In 1941, the BBC sought a layman able to speak about faith to a suffering nation. It had noticed The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis gave four series of talks from 1941 to 1944, first live from London, in about fifteen minutes. He spoke as he taught, with everyday images. The success was enormous: thousands of letters, listeners in barracks and shelters. These talks would become The Weight of Glory (1952). Meanwhile, he went to RAF bases to speak to young airmen, many of whom would not return: he would say it was the most difficult exercise of his life.

Going further

The Screwtape Letters (1942) follows a young man during the Blitz. That Hideous Strength (1941) is preached in a church full of soldiers. Perelandra and That Hideous Strength pose the question of science without morality at a time when totalitarian regimes claim to be manufacturing a new man, as The Abolition of Man (1943) does. In 1942, Lewis became president of the Socratic Club, founded at Oxford for believers and unbelievers to debate on equal terms.

What the two wars left in Narnia

Evacuated children, who open the series.
A never-naïve view of battles: in Narnia, battles are fought, Peter, Edmund, or Tirian know fear and wounds, but war is never glorified for its own sake. Battles are short, and what matters is courage, loyalty, and forgiveness. See our page on Narnia battles.
A soldier's loyalty: the promise made to Paddy Moore, kept for thirty years, sheds light on the importance of keeping one's word in the Chronicles.
A debated sentence: Father Christmas, by giving weapons to the children, warns that “battles are ugly when women fight in them.” It says a lot about Lewis's generation (see “Susan, Orual, and Joy”).

In brief

Today's link between Lewis and the Great War interests more and more researchers, even in northern France. For today's reader, rereading Narnia with knowledge of where its author came from changes the view of its battles: they are written by someone who knew the mud of Artois.

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