Tag: somme

Reader’s Corner: Tolkien on the Battlefield

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books1 Comment

somme1

In 1916, a 24-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien went off to fight for his country. He arrived in France just as the Battle of the Somme was about to erupt. At the end of the first day of fighting, almost 20,000 British soldiers were dead. The butchery went on for months. It would be a transformative experience for the young scholar.

lordoftherings1Joseph Loconte writes in the Times that Tolkien actually started writing The Lord of the Rings by candlelight at the front. It’s not hard to see the inspiration of the Somme’s blasted landscape, reek of poison gas, and corpses, in his descriptions of the Siege of Gondor and particularly Mordor.

Of course, the battles of Tolkien’s trilogy were quite different from what he saw at the Somme. His alliance of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men were combating a complete and all-encompassing evil that threatened the entire world. The German soldiers being faced by all those young men in the muddy trenches cut through the devastated French countryside were closer to mirror images than existential threat.

Loconte concludes:

Tolkien used the language of myth not to escape the world, but to reveal a mythic and heroic quality in the world as we find it. Perhaps this was the greatest tribute he could pay to the fallen of the Somme.

Reader’s Corner: John Keegan (1934-2012)

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

Another passing of a literary great was reported Friday. In short, John Keegan was the preeminent military historian of the modern era.

A believer in writing for the popular audience, Keegan bore some comparison to Niall Ferguson, particularly in staking out contentious theories, such as his support for the Iraq and Vietnam wars (thinking both were the least bad option) and his dismissal of the classic Clausewitzian definition of war as “politics by other means.” He was also a consummate gentleman to any who were lucky enough to hear him read.

Starting with his 1976 classic, The Face of Battle, Keegan helped turn the discipline from one that cared only about mass troop movements and the decisions of great generals to one that embraced a more holistic view of conflict, in particular how it affected the individual soldiers on the ground.

In this typically vivid scene from The Face of Battle, which studied the day-to-day experiences of British soldiers in three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, Keegan wrote about an officer who fell asleep the minute the march was halted:

…[he] did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914).