Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth Page A

Wiseman was set to oversee the Superb’s range-finding table. Early in the evening the Superb fired off several salvoes at a light cruiser over 10,000 yards away and flames were seen to burst out amidships. Surely this was a palpable hit, and the German vessel had been sunk. But no, it was afterwards seen, still in one piece, by ships astern. Again an hour later the Superb opened fire and struck home on the third and fourth salvoes; the enemy ship turned away, burning. The gunnery commander, who could see the battle with his own eyes, doubted many of Wiseman’s calculations; but the mist and the smoke of confrontation meant the fleets were fighting half-blind, and mathematics came into its own.
    If the Superb had been hit, the decks, which had no airtight compartments, would have swiftly flooded from prow to stern, as Wiseman was only too conscious: ‘No one below decks would get away in the case of a torpedo,’ he said. So it was fortunate for him and his 732 crewmates that she was in the centre of the fleet and never came under enemy fire, though between its two bursts of action the Superb passed close to the wreckage of the flagship Invincible , one of three British battle cruisers lost at Jutland. Men were in the chill water, clinging to flotsam and waving and cheering at the oncoming vessels. But the ships were ploughing ahead at full speed in a vast manoeuvre involving the whole Grand Fleet, and the men were swept under, or left bobbing in the wake. By the time the German fleet disengaged after nightfall, with the loss of just one of its own battle cruisers, over six thousand British seamen had been killed. All this overturned deeply held convictions that Britannia ruled the waves, even though it had kept its lead in the naval arms race against German rivalry during the run-up to the war. The news from Jutland, on the eve of Tolkien’s departure for France, was a profound blow to morale.
    When his train from London’s Charing Cross Station pulled in to Folkestone at one o’clock the following Monday, Tolkien found a town transformed from the quiet port he had seen in 1912 on camp with King Edward’s Horse. Now it was humming with activity, its hotels full of soldiers. He spent Monday night there and the next day, 6 June, boarded a troop ship that steamed across the Channel under escort by a destroyer. He watched the sea-birds wheeling over the grey waters and England recede, the Lonely Isle of his mythology.
    Somewhere inland from the French shores ahead, Rob Gilson was making a thumbnail sketch that day of his battalion as they snatched a rest at the side of a long tree-lined road, with the yellow sun westering behind them. The Cambridgeshires had moved south from the lowlands of Flanders into rolling Picardy, the ancient region through which the Somme wound; G. B. Smith was close by. Christopher Wiseman, now back at Scapa Flow, was having a rather chillier time as he led a party of snotties that day onto Hoy, the tallest of the Orkney islands. Disaster had befallen the British High Command. Lord Kitchener, the man whose rallying cry had propelled their generation into military service, had sailed the same day for Russia, and his ship had struck a mine shortly after sailing from Scapa Flow. Wiseman’s men were supposed to be searching for confidential documents that might have been washed ashore, but they found none; the snotties were more interested in hunting out puffins’ eggs: to his great consternation, they were quite unperturbed by Hoy’s 200-foot cliffs.
    At Calais the soldiers returning from leave were sent straight off to their battalions, but those arriving for the first time were sent to Étaples, the British Expeditionary Force’s base depot. ‘Eat-apples’, as it was known to the insular Tommy, was a veritable prison, notorious for its vindictive regime. Fenced in among the shoreland sands and pines, it consisted of a sprawl of warehouses and the