![]() ![]() The images we have inherited – trench desolation and destruction,īroken bodies and minds, perpetual mourning by families and the tortured memories of survivors – are the Great War's Of human waste in an industrially corrupted landscape. Names are familiar enough – Verdun, the Somme, Ypres – and these places elicit associations of visceral carnage, Twenty-first-century minds have a distinct image of what World War I was like. Violence a condition that mere individuals did their best to overcome with some semblance of human spirit intact. Lewis the war was one of many bad experiences that could befall a person, The western front reconstructed in generalities in his memoir that seem banal, that existed ‘rarely and faintly in memory’Īfterwards. ![]() The war was, to Lewis it was an experience that he remembered for its ‘guns and good company’, the horrors of Necessity, a ghastly interruption of rational life’. The sense of camaraderie that he remembered from the trenches, he wrote of the men with whom he served not as victims butĪs ‘fellow-sufferers’ participating in a destructive war that was unfortunate, but as he described it an ‘odious In his body, as a middle-aged man in the 1950s Lewis appeared un-disillusioned by his early life's encounter with war. But the words “ofĬourse” drew the sting.’ Despite suffering the miseries of trench life and a severe wound that left shrapnel ‘I am surprised I did not dislike the Army more,’ he wrote in hisĪutobiography Surprised by Joy. War I with a degree of paradoxical puzzlement. Lewis reflected upon his experiences in the British Army in World ![]()
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