15 April 1918

“A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”

— Psalm 91:7, KJV

The Trenches

Lewis said very little about the war, then or later. In Surprised by Joy he gave it only a few pages, and he said frankly that he had put most of it out of his mind. He mentioned in a few lines the cold, the mud, the weariness, the wounded and the unburied dead. He mentioned that the war was in a curious way unreal to him, as if it were happening to someone else. He was not a professional soldier, and he never pretended to have been a brave one. He did his duty, he endured, and when it was over he tried, with only partial success, to forget it.

His battalion held a sector of the line near Arras, in northern France. The winter of 1917 to 1918 was hard, and in February he fell ill with trench fever, a disease carried by lice that brought high temperatures and aching bones. He spent three weeks in a hospital at Le Tréport on the Channel coast. His letters home from there are almost cheerful: he had a bed, clean sheets and books. He read and recovered and in March went back to his battalion, just as the great German offensive broke.

The Shell

The Somerset Light Infantry were not at the centre of the March onslaught, but in April the Germans attacked again further north, on the River Lys, and Jack’s battalion was thrown into the fighting near the village of Mont-Bernenchon. On 14 April the battalion attacked. During the confused fighting Lewis was credited with taking the surrender of some sixty German soldiers, who appeared out of the smoke with their hands up and gave themselves up to him. He was always modest about it. As he told it, taking them amounted to discovering, with great relief, that they wished to surrender.

The next day, 15 April 1918, a shell burst close beside him. It was almost certainly a British shell falling short. Lewis was hit in three places: in the left hand, in the leg, and in the chest, where a fragment lodged below his armpit. The sergeant who was standing next to him, Harry Ayres, was killed outright. Lewis remembered Ayres afterwards with gratitude and affection. He had been a kind, steady man who had looked after his young and inexperienced officer, and Lewis felt that he owed him a great deal.

Lewis was carried back through the casualty stations to a base hospital at Étaples. His wounds were serious but not fatal. Some of the metal was removed at once. A fragment in his chest was left where it was, and he carried it for more than twenty-five years before it was finally taken out in 1944.

The Hospital in London

In late May he was brought back to England and admitted to a hospital in London. He wrote to his father, asking him to come. Albert, who was nervous of travel, set in his routines, and perhaps unable to face it, did not come. Jack wrote again. Albert still did not come. Through the whole of that summer and autumn, while his son lay wounded and then convalescent in England, Albert Lewis never once crossed the Irish Sea to see him.

It is easy to judge Albert harshly for this, and Jack did judge him harshly. But Albert was a widower of fifty-four, frightened of change, who had never been a traveller. His elder son was also at the front, and he was sick with anxiety for both of them. None of that made his absence hurt any less. Jack never forgot it.

Someone else did come. Janie Moore, who had by then been told that her own son was missing, came at once. She visited Jack in hospital, wrote to him and fussed over him, and when he was transferred in June to a convalescent hospital he asked to be sent to one near Bristol, where the Moores lived. He was moved to other camps and hospitals later in the year, and she followed. By the time news came that Paddy had certainly been killed, the bond between the wounded young officer and the bereaved mother was already strong. Jack had kept his promise before he knew he would have to.

A Book of Poems

While he was convalescing, Lewis prepared a collection of the poems he had written since his schooldays. It was published in March 1919 under the name Clive Hamilton, taking his mother’s maiden name, with the title Spirits in Bondage. The poems are those of a young man who has seen the war and believes that the universe is either empty or ruled by a cruel power. They are angry, sad and sometimes beautiful, and they set out a creed of defiant atheism. A few readers noticed them. Most did not. Lewis was disappointed but not discouraged. For the next decade his chief ambition was to be a poet.

The Survivor

In December 1918, a month after the armistice, Lewis was demobilised. He went home to Belfast for Christmas, and his father and brother met him with enormous relief. Then, in January 1919, he went back to Oxford to resume his degree. He was twenty years old. He had been a soldier for eighteen months, and he had been wounded, and his closest friend from training was dead. Many of the young men who had trained with him at Keble had been killed.

Lewis did not talk about survivor’s guilt, and he would not have liked the phrase. But he knew that he had been spared when others were not, and he knew that he had no explanation for it. The verse at the head of this chapter is from the ninety-first psalm, which many soldiers carried into that war and many did not carry out. It is not a promise that no believer will ever be hurt, for believers fell in their thousands on the Somme. It is a confession that every life is in the hand of God, and that those who are spared are spared for a purpose. Lewis did not yet believe in that hand. But it had been over him on 15 April 1918, and in time he would come to see it.