The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it…. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boats with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. 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 landscapes of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII)
I floundered for something to post tonight. Like so many Americans, I’m upset over a war strategy that seems both foolish and suicidal, with the fighting men (as always) paying the costs. Add to that that I’m reading a novel about the aftermath of World War I, the same sort of thing on a massive scale. So I settled on the excerpt from Surprised by Joy above, Lewis’s greatly softened public reminiscence of his war experience. (For a more candid view, see if you can find a copy of Jack’s Life, by Douglas Gresham, in which he relates what Jack told him in private about the war.)
I’d love to do a political rant, denouncing certain officials who shall remain nameless. But I haven’t the heart for it these days.
