![]() ![]() 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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