By the time of his nineteenth birthday, he was in the front-line trenches, near the village of Arras. Christmas was spent there. Back at Little Lea, Albert spent the day alone. He went to the early service at St Mark’s. ‘At times I was unable to repeat the responses. It is something more than sentiment and early associations that comforts a sorrowful man in this Holy Eucharist and leads him to look forward with firmer faith to the safety and salvation of those he loves … ’2 He nevertheless felt furious with Jack for not responding to Colonel Craig’s attempts to get the boy transferred to an artillery regiment. Jack, however, had his reasons. ‘I must confess that I have become very attached to this regiment. I have several friends whom I should be sorry to leave and I am just beginning to know my men and understand the work.’
School had been a nightmare which everyone expected him to enjoy. No one pretended that you should enjoy the Army, and this mysteriously made it more bearable.3 He found the camaraderie of the men, and of the senior officers, who were not in the least like the bloods of Malvern, much more to his taste. Even the ‘dugouts’ were not as bad as he had feared. ‘They are very deep, you go down them by a shaft of about 20 steps; they have wire bunks where a man can sleep quite snugly and braziers for warmth and cooking.’4 The trenches were also a place where ‘a man’, at least this man, could read. That January found him deeply absorbed in ‘Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, which I like even better’.
In February, he went down with trench fever, or pyrexia – with a high temperature, and many of the symptoms of influenza. He was transferred to the Red Cross Hospital at Treport and wrote home for ‘some cheap edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’.5 The hospital was a converted hotel, and the discovery of clean sheets, pretty nurses and above all books was very welcome to the patient. The only drawback to the place was that his room-mate was conducting a love affair with one of the nurses, and kept him awake. ‘I had too high a temperature to be embarrassed but the human whisper is a very tedious and unmusical noise.’6 When the amorous room-mate departed, Lewis was left on his own and read a volume of G. K. Chesterton’s essays. Here, too, was to be a great influence, almost comparable in scale and importance with George MacDonald; but for the time being he merely enjoyed Chesterton as a wit and stylist, without being quite aware of what it was that he was swallowing with the thrusts and paradoxes. ‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.’7
Once he was better, he had to put his books down and return to the Front. On one occasion, he took sixty German prisoners – ‘that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere all had their hands up’.8 He now began to taste the horror of the war. The corpses everywhere recalled the deadness of his dead mother. Days were passed squelching in thigh-length gumboots through the mud while facing enemy fire. Almost as much as the bullets, the soldiers dreaded the barbed wire. Merely to tear your boot on the wire was to fill it with muddy water. As the spring days advanced, the Germans increased their offensive, determined to make one last grand Wagnerian gesture of defiance against their almost inevitable defeat. During the battle of Arras on 15 April 1918, Lewis was on Mount Bernenchon. He was standing near his dear friend Sergeant Ayres when a shell exploded. It killed Ayres outright and the splinters from it hit Lewis in the leg, the hand, the face and just under the arm. This last splinter touched his lung and momentarily winded him. When he found that he was not breathing, he concluded that this was death. The intelligence dawned on him dully – inspiring neither fear nor courage. In fact, it was not death but that fate which all English soldiers coveted – a wound not of great gravity, but sufficiently serious to remove the victim from the scene of conflict: in other words, ‘a Blighty’.
After a short spell in the Liverpool Merchants’ Mobile Hospital, Étaples, he was taken home, and by 25 May he was able to wire to his father: AM IN ENDSLEIGH PALACE HOSPITAL ENDSLEIGH GARDENS LONDON. JACK. He followed up the telegram with a letter asking his father to come over and visit him for a few days. Albert was himself laid up with severe bronchitis at the time. Even so, given the fact (repeatedly revealed in his surviving diaries) that he was desperately worried about his boy, it is remarkable that he was unable to stir himself for a hospital visit when the bronchitis was clear.
Mrs Moore was not so diffident, and came to London at once to be near Jack. She was extremely worried about the fate of her own son, Paddy, who had been reported ‘missing’. Before they had been separated and sent off to different regiments, Paddy and Jack had made a pact: in the event of one or the other’s death, the survivor would ‘look after’ the bereft parent of the one who had been killed. Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen distinctly remembered this solemn undertaking being made by the two eighteen-year-old boys.9
To what extent Paddy Moore would have been a welcome guest at Little Lea in the event of Jack’s death, let alone able to ‘look after’ Albert Lewis, was never put to the test, for it was Moore who was lost, and Lewis who survived. After a few weeks in the Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Jack was well enough to get up, and he took the opportunity for a Sunday outing from London to Great Bookham.
Even to go to Waterloo was an adventure full of memories, and every station I passed on the way down seemed to clear away another layer of time that had passed, and bring me back to the old life. Bookham was at its best; a mass of green, very pleasing to one ‘that has been long in city pent’ … I opened the gate of Kirk’s garden almost with stealth, and went on past the house to the vegetable garden and the little wild orchard with the pond where I had sat so often on hot Sunday afternoons, and there among the cabbages in his shirt and Sunday trousers, sure enough, was the old man, still digging and smoking his horrible pipe … 10
The Kirkpatricks welcomed home the wounded soldier; Mrs Moore had welcomed him; but Albert still did nothing. One explanation may be found in a little incident which occurred several months later when Arthur Greeves happened to call at Little Lea and put his head round the study door. He found Albert slumped in a chair, very red in the face. ‘I’m in great trouble, you’d better go away,’ he said. Jack’s harsh gloss on this sentence was, ‘No evidence as to what this “great trouble” was has ever been forthcoming so I think we may with probability if not quite certainty breathe the magic word ALCOHOL.’11 He was still a boy. Alcohol was still a subject of mirth. Its nightmares – very forceful in his family – lay in the future.
It would not appear that Greeves said anything about Albert’s peculiar behaviour in his letters to Jack. The two friends were back to ‘normal’ as correspondents, swapping opinions about books, while from Greeves’s side there were confidences about his emotional and sexual preferences. Before going to the wars, Lewis had expanded upon his own taste, in imagination at least, for sado-masochism, and a fellow-Irishman called Butler, an old boy of Campbell College, had put him on to the Marquis de Sade. Arthur’s tastes were still developing along homosexual lines. From Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Lewis had written to him, ‘I admit the associations of the word paederasty are unfortunate but you should rise above that.’