Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth

Author:John Garth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

PART THREE

The Lonely Isle

ELEVEN

Castles in the air

The fever persisted. Tolkien wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Bird, his commanding officer, explaining his whereabouts, but All Hallows went by and after nine days in hospital at Le Touquet he was sent by train to Le Havre. There, on 8 November 1916, he boarded the soldier’s joy, ‘the Blighty boat’. A packet ship in peacetime, the steam liner Asturias was now brilliantly lit up and painted white, with green stripes and red crosses, to tell enemy submarines that she was a hospital ship and not a military target. She was large and comfortable, with cosy beds; and during the ten-hour crossing the next day there were sea-water baths to be had. Most homeward-bound soldiers were walking wounded, happy to have a minor but honourable ‘Blighty’ wound. The worst-hit survivors of battle never got further than the tented ‘moribund ward’ of the casualty clearing station in the field. Some, especially now that winter was here, were simply ill, like Tolkien; but others suffered from something worse than feverish delirium: they trembled or twitched uncontrollably and had an otherworldly look.

England glimmered into view: the Lonely Isle, ‘sea-girdled and alone’. The Asturias steamed into Southampton and the same day a train took Tolkien back to the city of his childhood. That night, Thursday 9 November, he was in a bed at the Birmingham University Hospital. Soon he was reunited with Edith, five months after the parting that had seemed ‘like a death’.

The First Southern General Hospital (as it was officially known) had been set up in September 1914 in the grand arched halls and corridors of the university at Edgbaston and was continually being expanded under pressure of war casualties, who were cared for by the Medical Corps with the assistance of Red Cross and St John Ambulance volunteers. Tolkien was not the only old TCBSite invalided home to Birmingham, for T. K. Barnsley was back too. Buried alive by a trench mortar at Beaumont-Hamel in August, Tea-Cake had been packed off to England with a split eardrum and suffering from shell shock. Rob Gilson’s sister, Molly, dressed wounds here for the army surgeon, Major Leonard Gamgee. A man of some repute, and an Old Edwardian, he was a relative of the famous Sampson Gamgee who had invented, and given his name to, surgical gamgee-tissue, mentioned by Tolkien as the source of Sam Gamgee’s surname in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien would not be here for long, if his commanding officer had his way. Captain Munday, the 11th Lancashire Fusilier’s new adjutant (Kempson having been shot through the shoulder in the attack on Regina Trench) sent a note for Tolkien to hand to the military authorities as soon as he was discharged from hospital. The battalion was short of officers, his signallers were under a non-commissioned officer, and he was needed badly, it said, adding: ‘Lt-Col Bird wishes me to state that he values the services of Lt Tolkien very highly.’ The CO was going to be very disappointed; but not so Tolkien’s friends.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.