C.S. Lewis in the British Army
Hoping for an academic career, the eighteen-year-old C.S. Lewis plans to study at University College in Oxford before the summer of 1917. However, because of the First World War (1914–1918), things turn out differently, and on 8 June 1917, he joins the British Army. He is billeted at Keble College in Oxford to be trained as an officer at the E Company, No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion. At Keble College, he shares a room with the young Irishman Paddy Moore (1898–1918), a peer from Bristol. They become friends, and Paddy introduces Lewis to his mother and sister, who live in Wellington Square, a few minutes walk from Keble College. Paddy’s mother, Mrs Janie Moore (1872–1951), stays there with her ten-year-old daughter Maureen (1906–1997) to be near Paddy. Lewis instantly likes the family and spends most of the time he has left with them.
On 26 September 1917, C.S. Lewis and Paddy are commissioned Second Lieutenants and given a month’s leave before leaving for the front in France. They had hoped to join the same regiment, but Paddy is assigned to the Rifle Brigade and Lewis to the Somerset Light Infantry. Instead of going home to Belfast, Lewis goes to Paddy’s home in Bristol, where he spends the first three weeks of his leave. During this visit, Lewis and Paddy probably promise each other that if one of them does not survive the war, the other will take care of his parent.
First World War
At the beginning of October 1917, Paddy goes to France, and on 19 October, C.S. Lewis joins his regiment in Crownhill, near Plymouth. On 15 November, he is ordered to the Western Front, and on 29 November, his nineteenth birthday, he arrives at the front in France. He spends the winter in the trenches at Monchy-Le-Preux, near Arras. In February 1918, he falls ill with trench fever and spends three weeks at the No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport. After his recovery, Lewis rejoins his battalion at Fampoux on 28 February. He faces the final German attack on the Western Front and participates in the Battle of Arras. On 15 April 1918, at Riez du Vinage, Lewis is wounded on his left arm and leg by German shrapnel. He is admitted to the No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital near Etaples. His twenty-two-year-old brother Warren (1895–1973), who is also in France with the British Army, borrows a bike and rides fifty miles from Doullens to Etaples to be with him. At the hospital, it is decided to leave the shrapnel where it is because it is too close to Lewis’s heart and difficult to remove. It is finally removed twenty-six years later, in 1944.
Being wounded, C.S. Lewis cannot stay in France. On 25 May 1918, he is back in England and admitted to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London. Despite his urging, Father Albert does not visit him, but Mrs Moore is a frequent visitor. On 25 June, Lewis is sent to convalesce at Ashton Court, near Bristol and the home of Mrs Moore. He is expected to take two months to recover, after which he may return to France, but his recovery is slower than expected. When he later moves from Bristol to Eastbourne and from there to Andover, Mrs Moore follows him. In September 1918, they receive the sad news that Paddy was killed in action at Pargny in France on 24 March. In December 1918, Paddy Moore is posthumously awarded the British Military Cross for his gallantry at Pargny.
At the end of the First World War, on 11 November 1918, C.S. Lewis is still not properly healed. On 24 December, he is discharged from hospital and demobilised. After the war, Lewis writes almost nothing about it, but the effects of the horrors he experienced linger. He is troubled by nightmares for years. In January 1919, Lewis returns to University College in Oxford to begin his studies. Mrs Moore takes a place in Oxford to be near him. She rents a house in Headington, and Lewis often stays with her. He fully joins the household when he no longer has to live at University College in June 1921. Lewis and Mrs Moore share a home for the rest of their lives together. In the next years, they live in several different homes. After years of near-poverty and living in rented accommodation, they move to The Kilns in Oxford in October 1930.
Spirits in Bondage
Besides studying and caring for Mrs Moore, C.S. Lewis is busy after the war with a project he has been working on since his arrival in France. From the moment he becomes a pupil of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in 1914, Lewis’s ambition is to be a poet. From that time onwards, he spends much of his holidays writing poetry. When at Keble College for his officer training, he turns in his spare time to poetry. During his time in France, he carries a notebook in his pocket, and he manages to write a number of poems about his experiences in the trenches. He continues writing his ‘war poems’ when at the hospital in London in May 1918, and later at several other army hospitals. During his rehabilitation at Ashton Court, Lewis’s collection of poems takes shape. His poems are both pessimistic and hopeful and rationalistic and romantic. According to Lewis himself, the poems string around the idea that nature is wholly diabolic and malevolent and that God, if He exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangement. Lewis combines these poems with others he has written before and sends them to publisher William Heinemann in London, who accepts them for publication. On 20 March 1919, when he is twenty years old, C.S. Lewis’s first book, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, is published. It is published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, Lewis’s first name and his mother’s family name.
› Read more about Keble College, Oxford University
Sources
Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis. Companion & Guide
Simon Horobin, C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
Jeffrey Schultz & John West, The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia