Sekhet mark’d the slaughter,
And toss’d his flaxen crest
And towards the Green-clad Chieftain
Through the carnage pressed;
Who fiercely flung by Sekhet,
Lay low upon the ground,
Till a thick wall of liegemen
Encompassed him around.
His clients from the battle
Bare him some little space,
And gently rubbed his wounded knee,
And scanned his pallid face.
The archaisms and the illusion of combat give way to a bathetic contemporary cameo. The down-to-earth reality of the rugby pitch gently mocks the heroic pretensions of the literary mode.
The mock-heroism of ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ reflects, consciously or otherwise, a truth about a whole generation’s attitudes. The sports field was an arena for feigned combat. In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means. Honour and glory cast an over-arching glamour over both, as if real combat could be an heroic and essentially decent affair. In his influential 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt had imagined a soldier spurring his men through bloody battle by echoing his old school cricket captain’s exhortation, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ Philip Larkin, a much later poet looking back across the decades, described volunteers queuing to enlist as if outside the Oval cricket ground, and lamented (or exhorted): ‘Never such innocence again.’ A wiser age had depicted War as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but in the Edwardian era it was as if he were engaged in little worse than a spot of polo.
In the years up to 1914, the prospect of international conflict was often considered. Victorian affluence was ebbing away from Britain, struck by agricultural setbacks and then by the cost of the Boer War. But Germany, unified in 1871, was the braggart youngster among the European powers. Undergoing rapid industrialization, it was manoeuvring for a stronger role in Europe via expansion of its colonial grasp and saw Britain, with its powerful navy, as the prime opponent.
The coming war had cast its shadow on the worldview of Tolkien and his friends when they were still at King Edward’s. As early as 1909, W. H. Payton, an excellent shot and a lancecorporal in the school’s junior Officer Training Corps, had argued in debate for compulsory military service. ‘Our country is now supreme and Germany wishes to be. We should therefore see to it that we are sufficiently protected against the danger of foreign invasion,’ he declared. In 1910, Rob Gilson had called for an international court of arbitration to replace war. Tolkien led the opposition. He preferred traditional hierarchies, and for example he once (perhaps not entirely in jest) equated democracy with ‘hooliganism and uproar’, declaring that it should play no part in foreign policy. An equal distrust of bureaucracy, or internationalism, or vast inhuman enterprises per se, lay behind his attack on a ‘Court of Arbiters’. With the help of Payton he had successfully dismissed the idea as unworkable. They had insisted that war was both a necessary and a productive aspect of human affairs, though one schoolboy had warned of ‘bloodfilled trenches’.
The temperature had risen by October 1911, when the Kaiser’s sabre-rattling prompted the debating society motion ‘this House demands immediate war with Germany’. But others insisted Germany was primarily a trade rival. G. B. Smith claimed that the growth of democracy in Germany and Russia would curtail any threat of war, assuring the debaters, with his tongue as usual in his cheek, that the only causes for alarm were the bellicose Daily Mail ‘and the Kaiser’s whiskers’. The debating society did not declare war on Germany. Smith wildly overestimated the strength of democracy in both countries, underestimated the influence of the press, and failed to see the real danger posed by Wilhelm II, an autocrat plagued by deep-seated insecurities. Just two days past his seventeenth birthday, and making his maiden speech to the debating chamber, he can be forgiven for naïvety; but in none of these misapprehensions was he alone.
Despite industrial unrest, Home Rule agitation in Ireland, and increasingly militant suffragette activism, to many Britons the era was a time of material comfort and tranquillity stretching into futurity. Only the loss of Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition and of the Titanic, both in 1912, raised doubts about the security of such long-term illusions.
King Edward’s was a bastion of robust sportsmanship, duty, honour, and vigour, all backed up by a rigorous grounding in Greek and Latin. The school’s anthem instructed the pupils:
Here’s no place for fop or idler, they who made our city great
Feared no hardship, shirked no labour, smiled at death and conquered fate;
They who gave our school its laurels laid on us a sacred trust,
Forward therefore, live your hardest, die of service, not of rust.
There had been drilling at King Edward’s in the Victorian era, though nothing systematic; but in 1907 Cary Gilson obtained military permission to set up an Officer Training Corps as part of national reforms to boost Britain’s readiness for military confrontation. The OTC was captained by W. H. Kirkby, Tolkien’s first-year master (and a noted shot in the part-time Territorial Army set up in the same reforms). Several of Tolkien’s rugby-playing friends became officers in the corps and Tolkien himself was one of 130 cadets. The corps also provided eight members for the school shooting team, with Rob Gilson (an OTC corporal) and W. H. Payton excelling on the ranges. Though Tolkien was also a good shot, he was not on the shooting team, but in the OTC he took part in drills and inspections on the school grounds, competition against the school’s other three houses, and field exercises and huge annual camps involving many other schools.
The massed corps was presented to the king and inspected by field marshals Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Lord Roberts, the liberator of Bloemfontein. The school Chronicle concluded: ‘It is quite evident that the War Office and the Military Authorities are expecting great things from the OT.’ One midsummer, Tolkien travelled to London with seven other King Edward’s cadets to line the route for the coronation of George V. The year was 1911, and gloriously hot; he wrote at the time that it had ‘kindled an immovable smile’ on his face. But as they camped in the grounds of Lambeth Palace on the eve of the big day, a long dry spell finally broke, and it rained. ‘Adfuit omen’, Tolkien later commented: ‘It was an omen.’* The contingent stood facing Buckingham Palace watching troops pass up and down under the eye of Kitchener and Roberts. They heard the cheers as the king set out, and finally they got a close-up view as the royal coaches passed right in front of them on their way back to the palace.
For now, these military preparations were an occasion for high spirits. From one Aldershot camp Tolkien brought back ‘harrowing’ tales of the devastation wrought among the cadets by punning – inflicted, no doubt, by his own circle. He had returned from another camp, at Tidworth Pennings on Salisbury Plain in 1909, with a real injury, but not one acquired in action. With characteristic impetuousness, he had charged into the bell tent he was sharing with seven others, leapt up and slid down