Letters

Heroic Drudgery

Regarding the otherwise excellent article by Charles C. W. Cooke in the September 8 issue (“A Gruesome Drudgery”), I must take exception in one matter. Cooke asserts that in the battles of 1914–18 there was little room for “chivalry or skill or heroism” (italics mine). This is quite mistaken. In the 1920s, veterans of the Great War such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis noticed a depressing revisionist trend in the literature of that conflict, one that stressed the irony of thousands of lives’ being wasted for small plots of shell-torn land. After the always-optimistic wartime propaganda, such revision was perhaps necessary, but as John Garth points out in Tolkien and the Great War, “it tends to be forgotten that many veterans resented the way their story was being told from 1926 onward, as a succession of disasters and discomforts with no gleam of achievement.” Tolkien wondered: “Are the prose and poetry of this age to be charged with disillusion and despair?”