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

• 1939: schoolgirls evacuated from London arrive at the Kilns, and Lewis notes the beginning of a story.
• 1917-1918: second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, wounded on 15 April 1918 at Mont-Bernanchon.
• 1941-1944: four series of talks on the BBC and lectures at RAF bases.
• The war runs through The Screwtape Letters, The Weight of Glory, That Hideous Strength and Narnia.

A first sentence that comes from 1939

In September 1939, England evacuates the children from the cities threatened by the bombing. The Kilns, Lewis’s house near Oxford, take in several schoolgirls who have come from London. Lewis, who has no children and knows them little, discovers their curiosity and is surprised by their lack of imagination. It is at this time that he notes the beginning of a story: four children evacuated to an old professor’s house. He abandons it, then takes it up again ten years later. It will be The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens precisely upon children “sent far from London because of the air raids”.

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

Looking back: the soldier of 1917

An Irishman, Lewis was not subject to conscription. He enlists all the same in 1917, through Oxford’s officer training corps. A second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, he arrives on the front line in the north of France on 29 November 1917, his nineteenth birthday. He knows the winter in the trenches, a bout of trench fever which sends him to hospital, then the German offensive in the spring. On 15 April 1918, at Mont-Bernanchon, a British shell that fell short wounds him in the chest, the hand and the leg, and kills his sergeant. His friend Paddy Moore is killed the same year. We tell of this French period in detail in “Lewis on the French side: the war, the translations, the readers”.

Lewis will speak little of it. In Surprised by Joy, he devotes to the war a few restrained pages: the cold, the mud, the men “like crushed beetles”, but also the comradeship and his admiration for the ordinary soldiers. He keeps from it a horror of war and a distrust of grand speeches. His first book, the collection of poems Spirits in Bondage (1919), is that of a young atheist returned from the front.

1939: studying while the world burns

In October 1939, Lewis preaches before the students of Oxford a sermon that has remained famous, Learning in War-Time. Why study poetry while Rome burns? Because human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice, he answers; war does not create the situation, it makes it visible. One must go on seeking the true and the beautiful, if only so as not to leave the mind to the propagandists.

The Lewis brothers in uniform

Lewis joins the Home Guard, the territorial guard, and patrols Oxford by night once a week, with a rifle on his shoulder. Warnie, a retired career officer, is recalled in 1939 and sent to France. Evacuated in 1940 during the débâcle, he is returned to civilian life and afterwards patrols the Thames in his little cruiser, in a unit of volunteers.

A voice on the radio

In 1941, the BBC is looking for a layman able to speak of the faith to a nation that has been sorely tried. It has noticed The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis gives four series of talks from 1941 to 1944, at first live from London, in about fifteen minutes. He speaks as he teaches, with images from everyday life. The success is enormous: thousands of letters, listeners in the barracks and the shelters. These talks will become Mere Christianity (1952). At the same time, he goes to bases of the Royal Air Force to speak to young airmen, many of whom will not come back: he will say that it was the most difficult task of his life.

A library of the war

The Screwtape Letters (1942) follows a young man during the Blitz. The Weight of Glory (1941) is preached in a church full of soldiers. Perelandra and That Hideous Strength raise the question of a science without morality at the moment when the totalitarian regimes claim to manufacture a new man, as does The Abolition of Man (1943). In 1942, Lewis becomes president of the Socratic Club, founded at Oxford so that believers and unbelievers might debate on equal terms.

What the two wars left in Narnia

• The evacuated children, who open the series.
• A view of battle that is never naïve: in Narnia, people fight; Peter, Edmund or Tirian know fear and wounds, but war is never glorified for its own sake. The battles are short, and what counts is courage, loyalty and forgiveness. See our page on the battles of Narnia.
• A soldier’s loyalty: the promise made to Paddy Moore, kept for thirty years, sheds light on the place of the given word in the Chronicles.
• A sentence that stirs debate: Father Christmas, as he gives the children weapons, warns that “battles are ugly when women fight in them”. It says a great deal about Lewis’s generation (see “Susan, Orual and Joy”).

And today?

The link between Lewis and the Great War is of interest to more and more scholars, even in the north of France. For a reader of today, rereading Narnia while knowing where its author comes from changes one’s view of its battles: they are written by someone who knew the mud of the Artois.

See also

• Lewis on the French side: the war, the translations, the readers
• Spirits in Bondage (title not translated)
• Mere Christianity
• The Screwtape Letters
• The Weight of Glory
• How Lewis created Narnia
• The household at the Kilns: Warnie, “Minto” and Maureen, the family Lewis chose for himself
• To reason or to tell stories? Lewis’s two arguments, and those who answered them
• Susan, Orual and Joy: the “misogynist Lewis” file reopened, with the evidence in hand
• Neither pacifist nor warmonger: Lewis, a former soldier, and the nine battles of Narnia
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Biography of C.S. Lewis (1): from Belfast to Oxford, 1898-1931