Since coming back and meeting a certain person, I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try and forget my various statements and not to refer to the subject … And now to tell you all the news. I am quite fairly comfortable here, we are in huts: but I have a room to myself with a fire in it and so am quite snug.13
But suddenly the dreaded summons to the front reached him. At 5.55 p.m. on 15 November 1917 Jack wired desperately to his father: ‘Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. Jack.’14
‘No one in Great Britain getting Jack’s wire would have had a moment’s doubt that he was on the eve of embarkation for overseas service,’15 wrote Warnie. But Albert Lewis simply wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’16 Even more desperately Jack wired back at 11.20 the following morning: ‘Orders France. Reporting Southampton 4 p.m. Saturday. If coming wire immediately.’17
Albert Lewis did not come, and Jack crossed to France on 17 November 1917. ‘This is really a very sudden and unpleasant surprise,’ he wrote to his father from France on 21 November. ‘I had no notion of it until I was sent off on my forty-eight hours final leave, in fact I thought they were ragging me when they told me. I am now at a certain very safe base town where we live comfortably in huts as we did at Crownhill.’18
Lewis arrived at the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November. To his great surprise he found that the captain of his company, P.G.K. Harris, was none other than ‘Pogo’ who taught him at Cherbourg School. Years before, Lewis said, the flashy Pogo had instilled in him the desire for ‘glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know’.19 The years since Cherbourg and the war had changed both pupil and master. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy, ‘As I emerged from the shaft into the dug-out and blinked in the candle-light I noticed that the Captain to whom I was reporting was a master whom I had liked more than I had respected at one of my schools. I ventured to claim acquaintance. He admitted in a low, hurried voice that he had once been a schoolmaster, and the topic was never raised between us again.’20 Lewis may never have known of Harris’s heroism. For his bravery at Verchain in October 1918 Captain Harris was awarded the Military Cross; his gallantry at Preseau on 1 November 1918 won him a glowing place in military histories.21
Meanwhile, Albert Lewis was very worried about his son and, believing that he would be safer in the artillery than in the infantry, he contacted Colonel James Craig, MP for the East Division of Co. Down, asking if he could get Jack transferred. ‘I am at present in billets in a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,’ Jack wrote to his father on 13 December.22 As Mr Lewis laboured to have his son transferred, Jack fell ill at the beginning of February 1918 with what the troops called ‘trench fever’ and the doctors PUO (pyrexia, unknown origin). He was sent for a pleasant three weeks at No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport.
He remained in hospital for the rest of the month, with one slight relapse early on, writing more and more nostalgic letters to Arthur Greeves about their quiet days together in Belfast and his own brief stay in Oxford. Arthur was worried that, because of Lewis’s love for Mrs Moore, their friendship was imperilled. ‘I must admit,’ Jack wrote to him on 2 February 1918, ‘fate has played strange with me since last winter: I feel I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it … As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills … Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life.’23
He returned to the front on 28 February, but was out of the immediate fighting area when the Germans launched their great spring offensive on 21 March utilizing all the additional troops withdrawn from the Eastern Front after the collapse of revolution-ridden Russia.
This, perhaps the worst crisis of the war, galvanized the War Cabinet into action at last. Lloyd George took over the direction of the War Office on 23 March and was soon transporting 30,000 men a day to France. General Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France, had said that he could only hold the Germans for eighteen days without the reserve: Lloyd George got them over to him within a week. Nevertheless, the Allies were not merely retreating, they were disintegrating. On 3 April Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch took over supreme command of the Allied Armies (his position was made official on 14 April) and was slowly able to halt the advance when the Germans were within forty miles of Paris. ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end,’ cried General Haig,24 speaking for the British forces of which he was still in supreme command when the second German putsch came (9–25 April) – and the line of defence stretched without breaking. General Ludendorff, the German chief of staff, drew back slowly and sullenly towards ultimate defeat.
During the First Battle of Arras, from 21 to 28 March 1918, Lewis was in or near the front line. ‘Until the great German attack came in the spring we had a pretty quiet time,’ he recorded in Surprised by Joy.
Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely ‘keeping us quiet’ by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day … Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire … 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 landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet – all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.25
Still in the area around Arras, Lewis next saw action in the Battle of Hazebrouck, from 12 to 15 April. The particular phase of that great battle in which he took part centred on Riez du Vinage. Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between 14 and 16 April:
The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols