C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper
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Bernenchon … As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on 14 April], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Cacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad!’ and were made prisoners.
When dawn broke on the 15th a considerable number of Germans in full marching order were seen: they were advancing in twos and threes into shell holes from houses north and north-east of Riez and from the northern end of Bois de Pacaut. Heavy rifle fire and Lewis-gun fire was opened on them, serious casualties being inflicted, and if a serious counter-attack was intended it was definitely broken up, for no further action was taken by the evening: his stretcher bearers were busy for the rest of the day.
About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men … a little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets … About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down …
The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.26
Lewis was wounded by an English shell exploding behind him. (‘Hence the greeting of an aunt,’ wrote Lewis, ‘who said, with obvious relief, “Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!”’)27 He was able to write a few lines to his father on 17 April, to say that he was in the ‘Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital, Etaples – Getting on all right but can’t write properly yet as my left arm is still tied up and it’s hard to manage with one.’28 And on 14 May: ‘I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case … In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my “pigeon chest” … this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.’29
When the Army medical records were released many years later, the Proceedings of the Medical Board assembled by order of the GOC London District described Lewis’s wounds thus:
The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated – there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.*
On 25 May 1918 Lewis arrived by stretcher at Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London. His first act was to send his father a telegram. Lewis was out of the war, though he did not yet know it. ‘I am sitting up in bed in the middle of a red sunset to answer this evening’s letter straightaway,’ he wrote to Arthur on 29 May. ‘I am in a vastly comfortable hospital, where we are in separate rooms and have tea in the morning and big broad beds and every thing the heart of man could desire; and best of all, in close communication with all the bookshops of London.’30
It is at this point in Lewis’s life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties. When about to describe his return to Oxford in January 1919, Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: ‘But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even if I were free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of this book.’31 In a more civilized age this would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs. But as so many of Lewis’s most personal letters and papers have been published or are available in public collections, we have no choice but to follow up all the available evidence as far as it will take us.
It does not, in fact, take us very far. Early ‘hostility to the emotions’, aggravated by his (perhaps exaggerated) revulsion against the unsavoury perversions at Malvern, made Lewis excessively wary of ‘the lusts of the flesh’. While he discussed these matters freely with Arthur Greeves, and after his conversion spoke of his early sins with understandable detestation (we may add, with perhaps some exaggeration hovering between a touch of subconscious pride at his regeneration and a very real gratitude to God for helping him to achieve it), the available material gives absolutely no concrete evidence of lapses from chastity in the stricter sense.
Undoubtedly Lewis ‘fell in love’ once or twice in his youth and early manhood, just as naturally as he felt carnal desire for the dancing mistress at Cherbourg – or the various other women whose physical charms, or the lack of them, he discussed with Greeves. Even during the terrible stress of his fifteen months in the Army, several of them with death imminent and probable, he apparently did not waste his pay ‘on prostitutes, restaurants and tailors, as the gentiles do’.32 And none of the more serious love-affairs that he mentions or suggests in letters and diaries seem to have progressed very far.
The only really overwhelming ‘love-affair’ of his early life, and that to which he may well be referring in Surprised by Joy, was of a kind and took so surprising a turn that it can hardly be classified with the ordinary ‘lusts of the flesh’. His affection for Mrs Moore – his infatuation, as it seemed to his friends and even to his brother who knew him more intimately than any of them – may have started with that incomprehensible passion which attractive middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths: but it very soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute – in many ways a father-substitute also.
When Lewis had been ordered to the front and had telegraphed to his father to come and spend his last day in England with him, Albert Lewis had indeed ‘misunderstood’ the telegram and not come. It might have been a genuine misunderstanding. But in June 1918, when he lay wounded in hospital in London, Lewis wrote several times begging his father to visit him: ‘Come and see me,’ he wrote on 20 June. ‘I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.’33 Warnie later wrote:
One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.34
Lewis was moved from London towards the end of July, to a convalescent home in Ashton Court near Clifton, Bristol, which he chose as it was near Mrs Moore – and there were difficulties in the way of getting