Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth Page B

tented camps run by each army division, British, Canadian, South African, Australian or New Zealand. Now, transferred out of his training battalion, Tolkien bedded down that first night with other men bound for the 32nd Division, towhich G. B. Smith’s 19th Lancashire Fusiliers belonged. But it proved a false start. The next day he was assigned to the 25th Division and the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, which had seen heavy, and costly, fighting at Vimy Ridge in May. Possibly the posting was connected with the fact that the 11th Battalion’s signals officer, Lieutenant W. H. Reynolds, had been noticed for his exceptional work at Vimy and was about to be promoted above battalion level, thus creating a vacancy. But for Tolkien this was a blow to long-cherished hopes. To compound his bad luck, the kit he had bought at such expense on Smith’s advice had disappeared in transit, forcing him to cobble together a whole new set of equipment, including camp-bed and sleeping bag, for nights under canvas in the chill of what turned out to be a most wintry June.
    A message was sent off to tell the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers that he was there awaiting orders. The sense of edgy excitement evaporated, and Tolkien sank into boredom. Now he slept on the dusty hilltop where the 25th Division recruits were encamped, writing letters. To circumvent the censor, Tolkien adopted a code of dots by which Edith could locate him, and while he was in France she traced his movements on a large map pinned to the wall at Great Haywood. He was issued with a gas helmet (a chemically treated flannel bag with glass eyepieces and a valve for the mouth), the newly compulsory tin hat, and a rifle for drill. Every day he would march out in a column of over 50,000 men to the vast sandy bowl known as the Bull Ring, where he was mercilessly put through his paces along with hundreds of other officers. On days when it was not pelting with rain, the troops came back white with dust. The road to the Bull Ring passed the lines of many hospitals, and a huge military cemetery. Tolkien later recalled that his vision of a purgatorial encampment, the poem ‘ Habbanan beneath the Stars’, might have originated here.
    Out of acute homesickness a new poem emerged, ‘ The Lonely Isle ’, describing his sea-crossing from England, to which the verse is dedicated.
O glimmering island set sea-girdled and alone—
    A gleam of white rock through a sunny haze;
    O all ye hoary caverns ringing with the moan
    Of long green waters in the southern bays;
    Ye murmurous never-ceasing voices of the tide;
    Ye plumèd foams wherein the shoreland spirits ride;
    Ye white birds flying from the whispering coast
    And wailing conclaves of the silver shore,
    Sea-voiced, sea-wingèd, lamentable host
    Who cry about unharboured beaches evermore,
    Who sadly whistling skim these waters grey
    And wheel about my lonely outward way -
    For me for ever thy forbidden marge appears
    A gleam of white rock over sundering seas,
    And thou art crowned in glory through a mist of tears,
    Thy shores all full of music, and thy lands of ease—
    Old haunts of many children robed in flowers,
    Until the sun pace down his arch of hours,
    When in the silence fairies with a wistful heart
    Dance to soft airs their harps and viols weave.
    Down the great wastes and in a gloom apart
    I long for thee and thy fair citadel,
    Where echoing through the lighted elms at eve
    In a high inland tower there peals a bell:
    O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!
    G. B. Smith sent condolences that the hoped-for summer with Edith at Great Haywood had been cut short and that Tolkien would not be coming to join him in the Salford Pals. ‘ I do pray for you at all times and in all places,’ he added, ‘and may you survive, and we survive the fiery trial of these events without loss of our powers or our determination. So shall all things be for good. Meanwhile trust God and keep your powder dry, and be assured that