Did Tolkien's Job in the Trenches Influence his Imagination?

Fantasy and the signal battle of 1916

If you watched the biopic of John Ronald Ruel Tolkien’s life made a couple of years ago, you saw a fair, if compressed version of his life. Barring a structural issue in the third act, it is not bad. However, the vision of his time in the trenches during the most infamous British offensive of the First World War is a complete fantasy.

Plenty has been said before about the influence of the Western Front experience on Tolkien’s writing. In Frodo, we find evidence of PTSD, shell shock, and the enervating effects of wounding in an age before antibiotics. Glowing corpses in watery shell holes are clear precedent for the Dead Marshes on his journey with Samwell. Tolkien was hardly immune to the horrid conditions of the trenches — indeed, a louse-born trench fever nearly killed him, resulting in his discharge from service. He was in the beaten zone of German machine gun and shell fire where tens of thousands of British men died before ever even getting over the top. Nevertheless, I have yet to read informed literary comment on what Tolkien actually did in the trenches.

As you see in the photo above, the signal battle is a real one. Men must work in the open to transmit the message using specialized equipment. More to the point, a series of relay stations like this one must all have line of sight to one another in order to transmit a message. Helpfully, Peter Jackson’s film version of Pippin lighting the Beacon of Gondor captures this kind of system as a dramatic visual spectacle. Tolkien might have groaned to watch the scene, however. He mentions only seven stations in the chain, whereas Jackson has portrayed eleven. Observing the scene, a signal officer wonders: how are these teams keeping their wood piles dry? How are they staying warm? What are they eating? How often do they receive mail? These are the practical questions he had to consider every day in managing a signal unit that was spread across the battlefield.

The instrument the soldiers are using in the photo above is called a heliograph. It began as a surveying instrument, but quickly found new purpose in flashing Morse code signals. One mirror gathers sunlight; the other is used to reflect that light towards the receiving station. The soldier on the left watches the sending station through his telescope, repeating each letter aloud; the soldier on the right repeats each letter. This process is mechanical, distracting the operator from comprehending the content of the message. Only the man in the middle — a sergeant, perhaps — is in a position to overhear and understand the message in full.

Rejection of industrialized modernity is not subtext in Tolkien, but actual text. Trees march out of the forest to tear down a corrupt military-industrial complex bent on ecocide. It is therefore unsurprising to find him rejecting “progress” in the form of instant communications, as with the Palantir, a sort of magical wireless transmission station. When information moves at the speed of light, information overload becomes possible. Imagine that you are one of only three people in the whole division who know just how bad the casualties in today’s attack really were, and that you cannot tell anyone. Some of the worst stress in wartime comes from the mere knowledge of things that cannot be spoken: gaze into the abyss, and it gazes back into you.

On reflection, one sees that signaling is fairly present in Tolkien’s work. For example, the Horn of Gondor is a signaling device. Sauron hears whispers everywhere, opens the assault on Minas Tirith with a signal of thunder, and so on.

Despite maintaining a rather extensive intelligence network, however, the villain of Middle Earth manages to miss the bright, burning beacons, or gather their significance. The Army of Mordor is thus caught flat-footed when the Rohirrim arrive — in fact, their confusion and disorder is so complete that the men of Rohan have time to stop for a speech. An intelligence failure this complete is hard to understand or forgive. At the very least, Sauron ought to fire his intelligence chief or resign himself.

He should fire his training staff too. Another form of failure is portrayed in the scene at Harlond, the port of Minas Tirith. A battalion of orcs waits impatiently for their pirate allies to arrive. Ships seem to glide up to the quay without sailors in the rigging, yet there is no ship-to-shore signaling. This total lack of regard for OPSEC, or operational security, results in complete tactical surprise by a trio of adventurers leading a ghost army. The result is decisive defeat.

I am particularly struck by the motif, occurring first chronologically in Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and then in his Two Towers, of grand constructions being torn down. First, Melkor, Sauron’s mentor in evil, smashes the twin lamps of the Valar, which had cast light onto the world and made things grow. Through the spirit of Manwë, the sun and the moon replace the former signs of hope and generative energy. The destruction of Isengard and Barad-dûr forms a bookend with the more ancient event in Tolkien’s epic myth. As the Third Age of Middle Earth draws to a close, the ancient darkness has been banished, even if the sadness has not, for like the Somme — indeed, as with the entire First World War — Tolkien’s story is a tragedy. Wherever we see light in a dark, cold universe, part of us wants to believe it is some kind of signal.