Paul McCusker - C. S. Lewis & Mere Christianity: The Crisis That Created a Classic

1918

J ACK L EWIS OR C LIVE S TAPLES L EWIS , as he was officially known clutched his rifle and marched across the French field of Mont Bernanchon. The ground ahead was pitted with large holes made by the cannon shells that had been falling since the campaign began. Sergeant Harry Ayres a man Jack respected as a father figure accompanied him on the careful march across the field.

It was a spring evening and not a very pleasant one for the soldiers fighting in the Great War, as it was then called. To honor national alliances around Europe, young men of Britain and France had been drafted to repulse the German army after it invaded Belgium and marched into France. The warring sides had been fighting there for four years, mostly at an impasse, by the time Jack showed up. The only advance either side made was in the number of wounded and dead.

There were moments when the acrid smoke cleared enough for Jack to see the French village of Riez du Vinage to the northeast. At any other time it might have been a nice place to visit. Now it was merely a plot of land to be captured.

Though shells burst and gunfire sounded nearby, Jack and Sergeant Ayres stopped to consider their position. They were part of an aggressive push, their battalion moving behind a creeping barrage of shells from the British. It was unclear whether theyd advanced too far and that was worrisome.

Jack was a five-footten, heavy-set young man, only nineteen years old, and a would-be intellectual before the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry enlisted him for battle. His qualifications as an officer were marginal, yet he was already a second lieutenant. Hed been fighting in the war for only a few months, having arrived the previous November. His experience thus far included digging a lot of trenches, feeling miserably cold and wet, enduring a pervasive weariness, and spending a month in the hospital with trench fever. He had also learned how to fall asleep while marching, how to wear the same boots so long that they felt as if theyd become attached to his feet, and how to ignore the stiff corpses scattered all around him.

Then the German army launched a major offensive in March. Now, in mid-April, Jack was part of the counterattack. So far the campaign was going better than expected. Many of the German soldiers gave up. At one point Jack himself had taken sixty German prisoners. But that morning the enemy regrouped for an attack from the village. The Allied forces fought back.

Explosions sounded from somewhere ahead. Men cried out and fell.

Jack looked to Ayres, the more experienced soldier. In an instant the two men realized the shells werent coming from the Germans ahead, but from the British artillery behind them. The infantry had gained more ground than the commanders had realized. Jack and Ayres were now in the line of fire from their own cannons.

Another shell exploded.

Sergeant Harry Ayres was killed instantly by the blast. For Jack, everything went silent, and the ground in front of [him]