John Ronald goes to War

John Ronald crushed the note inside his hand and let out a sigh. Seventeen days. They had waited seventeen days to tell him Robert was dead. He wondered if the others knew already. The message had taken so long to reach him that it was barely news anymore. His body could be buried and forgotten by then.

There was nothing he could do for his friend now, and he knew it was useless to wallow in sadness. Many men died daily, which made the soldiers feel numb about the loss of their comrades in the midst of war. John Ronald was standing inside the trench, drowning in the muddy black soil among the bare tree trunks, wondering if it was better to live or to die in The Somme. He breathed deeply and swallowed hard, his throat was as dry as his lips. He allowed himself a minute to feel sad, sixty seconds of self-pity and desperation. Then he bowed his head, sending a prayer for his lost friend. He thought about Christopher and Geoffrey too, and prayed for God to keep them safe wherever they were.

‘Sir,’ the private said, ‘Lieutenant Tolkien?’

‘Thank you for the note,’ he said, looking up. His mind was full of distant images of Robert, ‘I am quite hungry tonight. Do you know what’s for dinner?’

‘Beans in a can probably,’ answered the soldier. John Ronald realized he had not met the boy before.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Philip Shuttleworth. Everyone calls me Pip,’ the private saluted him. The lad was keen on staying, ‘just got here a week ago.’

A new battalion had just arrived at the frontline after the Fusiliers pulled back the German troops that inhabited those trenches. They live better than the English, John Ronald thought. No wonder why they are resisting the attacks.

‘Let’s eat together then, Pip,’ he said after a minute, ‘I want to sleep through the bombing tonight and it’s getting late.’

The pea-soup looked somewhat appetizing, yet it always arrived cold from the catering quarters. Its green color was brighter under the light of the oil lamps, which made the shadow of the brown soil walls even darker.

‘Is there any bread left, Pip?’ John Ronald asked.

‘Here,’ the private reached for the tray and John Ronald hoped it was one of the fresh batches. If it was too hard it would pull his teeth and hurt his mouth as he chewed. He sniffed it and took a bite.

‘It’s not that bad. Not soft, not too stale,’ he swallowed, ‘this bread could keep me going for days,’ he said jokingly.

‘The flavor is different lately,’ Pip remarked, ‘and it looks like a brick.’

‘I heard they use turnips when the flour runs out. Samuel Earnshaw works with the kitchen troop and keeps me updated,’ the lieutenant gave Pip a faint smile.

They sunk their spoons into the dishes, made of petrol cans, jam jars, and anything they could find in the trenches. They both ate in thoughtful silence, two lonely figures surrounded by five more men, equally sullen. The weight of war had sapped their strength.

Each day blended into the others. Advancement, occupying the trenches, and waiting for the unceasing rattling of the machine-gun fire. At least they had pea-soup and tea. The latter also arrived cold, but it was sugary and milky, which helped with the flavor. Even sad faces would smile at the smell of occasional bully beef and baked potatoes, meals they welcomed after long days of toil.

‘You’re looking gloomy, Tolkien,’ said a voice that came from the darkness.

‘Robert Gilson died on the first day of battle,’ whispered John Ronald.

‘So did ten thousand more Englishmen, Ronald,’ another voice answered from the other side of the hole. It was true. Countless men had lost their lives in just a fortnight of battle. How many more were going to perish? ‘I am sorry for your loss, though.’

Robert Gilson’s death had made John Ronald aware of imminent mortality. He resolved to write to the rest of the TCBS, Geoffrey, and Christopher, about the terrible news before something else happened. John Ronald had last seen Geoffrey Smith in Bouzincourt at the beginning of July, a few days after he had arrived at the frontline. By the time of their return, Robert was already dead, and they had remained behind a sweet veil of ignorance.

In Bouzincourt he had written to Edith. He hoped she was safe in England. Who knew what would happen if Germany invaded their country? Bouzincourt’s army post office was inside an abandoned building in the center of what had once been a beautiful town. In 1916 not much was left of it. Only the debris of houses and shops remained, everyone had left when the shells had started to fire.

John Ronald saw those July days as the prelude to salvation. His battalion, 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, had come to help their fellowmen, and they had kept their word. Now, after the attack on Ovillers, Bouzincourt seemed like a distant dream from which he had suddenly awakened. His last encounter with Geoffrey before they parted, the letters they had received, and the faces of soldiers that had died since.

He remembered watching the little villages along the coast, trying to look for the France he had always heard people talk about. Instead, John Ronald had found an enticing desolation. He held in his heart the vision of a nearby town, Albert, the last bit of civilization he had seen before arriving at The Somme.

‘Pip, have you been to Albert?’ John Ronald asked swallowing the last of his tea, ‘just a couple of days before we got to the frontline we crossed the most wonderful place, all reduced to dust,’ he said. He longed for biscuits that would never come.

‘Everything turns to dust here,’ answered Pip, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust'.

‘Wise words,’ John Ronald smiled, ’when’s the priest coming next?’ he asked.

‘Who knows? There’s nothing certain lately,’ answered another private.

‘Keep talking about Albert, lieutenant Tolkien,’ said Pip.

He was good at telling stories. John Ronald would sit down next to the oil lamps and create new worlds away from the war. He smiled at Pip.

‘The day we marched through the town, we walked by an ancient church. I was feeling homesick and hopeless, so I looked up and asked God for a sign,’ he paused, looking around him. Everyone was paying attention to his words, ‘it was then when I saw it. A golden statue, hanging from a metal chord. I saw the church pinnacle had broken, and Virgin Mary’s fate was pending between the abysm and heaven. It had probably been hit by a shell, splattering the ceiling all over the place. Yet she was struggling to survive still, a miracle hanging from the sky.’

‘Did it fall in the end?’ asked another soldier. His name, John remembered, was Stephen Gregory.

‘No. Do you know why?’

‘Tell us,’ said Pip.

‘Because it was holding on to what mattered most. Hope.’

As it always happened whenever Tolkien ended his story, there was not a single sound in the cave. The message of hope was one they abandoned often, and John Ronald reminded them that there was a thing greater than themselves. By the end of the conversation, they had all finished their dinner. They were far from satisfied but had forgotten about their hunger and exhaustion for a moment. That night, the bombing started early.

Looking at the sky after dusk was addictive and dangerous at the same time. John Ronald could not sleep, but he could not take his eyes off the shells either. They exploded in the distance, crimson lights that filled the air after their blast shook the ground.

‘A dull red glare under the lowering clouds,’ he wrote in the back of an envelope, ‘yet it is not the red of dawn. We hide from Hell.’

John Ronald could hear the screams of pain and death outside. Some soldiers thought it was safe to come out of their hiding place at night. They smoked and drank carelessly, becoming prey to the enemy’s shells. Pip had fallen asleep and was snoring softly when he came into the room. He noticed his face was relieved from all the worries of the war. He had entered a space between present and past, between happiness and sorrow.

The spectacle was always macabre, the sky dyed with the color of blood and fire. That time of day was harder than any other. John often found himself scribbling on the back of Edith’s letters thoughts on life and death. That day he had chosen death. When he got on the boat and left Edith behind something had died inside him. All things relating to her had been difficult: first Father Francis Morgan, then Oxford and his studies. The time Edith and he had spent together had not been long, but it had been meaningful. He thought about her at night, when he missed her quick, witty intellect and her lovely face. They had only been married for a couple of months before he had left England. The green hills of the countryside faded into the horizon as the vessel sailed to France, and a sad Edith Tolkien had been left waving on the dock. The wind had been strong, and their tears many.

John Ronald remembered the day of their wedding. March daffodils were blooming across the churchyard as splashes of color. She had been wearing a white dress and looked like a Norse heroine at the end of her adventure. Edith had smiled at him the same way she had when they first met. Under the close eye of Mrs. Faulkner, she had managed to make him fall in love with her. Playing the piano, singing, reading... and now, after leaving, Ronald felt a void in his heart. It hurt inside his body, a heavy burden that would not go away.

Another shell struck in the sky. This time people screamed, there was gas coming from the explosion. The toxic smoke killed dozens of soldiers and burned their insides without mercy. John Ronald knew better. He woke up Pip and handed him a gas mask, then he wore one himself. They both stood up from the bunk beds and ventured outside the cave. The air was covered with a grey mist, the silent killer was among them.

‘Don't take it off,’ he said to Pip.

‘Not a chance, lieutenant Tolkien,’ answered the soldier.

When would that nightmare be over? When would they be free again? The tear gas made everything look gloomy and mystical, but not in the way he had read in books. John Ronald thought the Somme portrayed what Alfheim would have been like if evil had prevailed over good. In the real world, the dark elves had taken over and destroyed all that was good. Among the dead men stood masked soldiers, carrying their bodies to a safe place. Yet John Ronald knew they would never be buried. The countryside of The Somme would remain an open graveyard for years to come.

In King Edward’s School, he had been naive regarding war. He remembered Robert Gilson debating the idea of an international court of arbitration to help solve the problems they had with Prussia, which was growing too powerful. A reckless student had said that war was necessary, a basic need of humans to settle their affairs. John Ronald had agreed.

‘I think it’s over,’ Pip said after a prolonged silence outside.

‘It’ll never be over,’ answered John Ronald, ‘it never will.’

‘Lieutenant, we must hold on to the thought that this war can’t last forever. You said it yourself, hope is key,’ the soldier said, walking through the muddy passageways that connected the trenches, ‘we have to see if everyone’s fine.’

John Ronald stopped. If Pip could go on in a time like this, he should be strong too. The tear gas had dissipated and he took his mask off, finally being able to breathe some clean air. As clean as it could be after the toxic bombings and ashy shells.

‘Come with me,’ cried out John Ronald, ‘be careful. Stay alive.’

As they walked the narrow space of the trench, John Ronald saw how they had been living for the past two months. Stairs built with rotting wood, made from the trees that had fallen on the battlefield, mud covering the walls made from dirt... John Ronald climbed up and observed the wilderness. Tree trunks that were half destroyed by the lighting of war, pools of rain and blood coming out of the stiff bodies, a bleak scenery. They had not been able to bring back those who had fallen, and John Ronald could see the black dots on the landscape, the swallowed-up graves from the battle. It reeked of the fumes of the bombings and blood. Some corpses that had been hit by the enemy had fallen into the trench. The lieutenant looked down and met a soldier’s glassy eyes after meeting death. He could not handle it for much longer.

John Ronald fell on his knees and put his hands together. He prayed to the Lord Almighty. Was there any good left on Earth? How could God allow this to happen? He wondered about his fellow TCBS members. Prayed for Gilson, that had already met his fate. Prayed for God to keep Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman alive, for John knew they had always been reckless chaps. And he prayed for Edith, to see her again and hold her in his arms.

Then he allowed himself to cry. To feel desperate for freedom, thinking about his cottage, and Edith sitting down reading a book out loud. The afternoons' John Ronald and his Barrovian brothers had spent in the tea club, reading and talking about art. Reciting poetry and Norse ballads. He was twenty-four and the world was collapsing around him.

‘Sir?’ he heard the voice coming from far away, ‘there is nothing we can do for these ones. They called the medical corps.’

‘We can’t leave them, Pip.’

‘They are already gone, Lieutenant Tolkien,’ Pip was holding him up, but Ronald let go of his arm.

‘Gilson’s dead. I don’t know whether the others are still alive…’ John Ronald exploded, ‘why is God sparing my life when he destroyed so many others?’

John Ronald looked up at Pip. That small, skinny chap who stood in front of him was being braver than he had been for a while. Pip glanced back at him with his green eyes full of innocence.

‘That is what war is, Sir,’ he started breathing heavily. Pip was crying, ‘but we have to fight, not only for us but for our loved ones.’

John Ronald kept staring at the soldier. He could not be more than eighteen, drafted too soon, a boy whose childhood had been ended by the guillotine of war. A fate shared by many, who abandoned their homes to become heroes of the nation.

‘Where are you from, Pip?’

‘Shaftesbury, Lieutenant Tolkien,’ a village boy tricked by the government with empty promises, ‘all my family lives there.’

A little smile shadowed the young soldier’s face. There was hope left in his heart, for the future, for a better life. John Ronald could not fight against that.

‘Let’s keep going then,’ John Ronald said finally, ‘for England.’

‘For our families and friends,’ Pip said as it started raining, ‘and pray, Lieutenant, there will be merry days again.’