C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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      He returned to the front on 28 February, but was out of the immediate fighting area when the Germans launched their great spring offensive on 21 March utilizing all the additional troops withdrawn from the Eastern Front after the collapse of revolution-ridden Russia.

This, perhaps the worst crisis of the war, galvanized the War Cabinet into action at last. Lloyd George took over the direction of the War Office on 23 March and was soon transporting 30,000 men a day to France. General Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France, had said that he could only hold the Germans for eighteen days without the reserve: Lloyd George got them over to him within a week. Nevertheless, the Allies were not merely retreating, they were disintegrating. On 3 April Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch took over supreme command of the Allied Armies (his position was made official on 14 April) and was slowly able to halt the advance when the Germans were within forty miles of Paris. ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end,’ cried General Haig,²⁴ speaking for the British forces of which he was still in supreme command when the second German putsch came (9–25 April) – and the line of defence stretched without breaking. General Ludendorff, the German chief of staff, drew back slowly and sullenly towards ultimate defeat.

      During the First Battle of Arras, from 21 to 28 March 1918, Lewis was in or near the front line. ‘Until the great German attack came in the spring we had a pretty quiet time,’ he recorded in Surprised by Joy.

Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely ‘keeping us quiet’ by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day … Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire … I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war – the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet – all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.²⁵

      Still in the area around Arras, Lewis next saw action in the Battle of Hazebrouck, from 12 to 15 April. The particular phase of that great battle in which he took part centred on Riez du Vinage. Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between 14 and 16 April:

      The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols ascertained that the enemy was holding Riez du Vinage, a small wooded village north of the canon and north-east of Mt Bernenchon … As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on 14 April], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Cacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad!’ and were made prisoners.

      When dawn broke on the 15th a considerable number of Germans in full marching order were seen: they were advancing in twos and threes into shell holes from houses north and north-east of Riez and from the northern end of Bois de Pacaut. Heavy rifle fire and Lewis-gun fire was opened on them, serious casualties being inflicted, and if a serious counter-attack was intended it was definitely broken up, for no further action was taken by the evening: his stretcher bearers were busy for the rest of the day.

       About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men … a little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets … About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down …

The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.²⁶

Lewis was wounded by an English shell exploding behind him. (‘Hence the greeting of an aunt,’ wrote Lewis, ‘who said, with obvious relief, “Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!”’)²⁷ He was able to write a few lines to his father on 17 April, to say that he was in the ‘Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital, Etaples – Getting on all right but can’t write properly yet as my left arm is still tied up and it’s hard to manage with one.’²⁸ And on 14 May: ‘I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case … In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my “pigeon chest” … this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.’²⁹

      When the Army medical records were released many years later, the Proceedings of the Medical Board assembled by order of the GOC London District described Lewis’s wounds thus:

The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated – there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.^*

On 25 May 1918 Lewis arrived by stretcher at Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London. His first act was to send his father a telegram. Lewis was out of the war, though he did not yet know it. ‘I am sitting up in bed in the middle of a red sunset to answer this evening’s letter straightaway,’ he wrote to Arthur on 29 May. ‘I am in a vastly comfortable hospital, where we are in separate rooms and have tea in the morning and big broad beds and every thing the heart of man could desire; and best of all, in close communication with all the bookshops of London.’³⁰

It is at this point in Lewis’s life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties. When about to describe his return to Oxford in January 1919, Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: ‘But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to СКАЧАТЬ