It was the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 that the two sides fighting The Great War agreed to initiate an armistice. In man’s increasingly efficient ways of killing one another that was going to be The War to End All Wars. Such a grim declaration turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. Today is the day we set aside every year to remember not just that war but every serviceman or woman who sacrificed their physical health, their mental health, their life, or hopefully just their time in order to give people like me the opportunity to write what I want when I want. What many do not know is that writers have gone to war as well. Certainly there were the Ernie Pyle’s of the world imbedded with the troops as journalists. What I am referring to today, however, are the writers we have grown up with who served. The most obvious place to start is Ernest Hemingway. He joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and was sent to the Italian front in 1918. There he witnessed horrifying carnage of which he wrote about in his book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments". He was later wounded by a mortar round but still managed to help several Italian soldiers to safety. For his action he was awarded Italian Silver Medal for Bravery. He spent 6 months in a hospital recovering. J.R.R. Tolkien already had a university degree but joined the British Army as a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in World War One. He was in the Battle of the Somme. After 5 months on the front he came down with trench fever and was discharged to England where he continued writing. After the war he formed a writer’s group that included a man with whom he would become good friends. That man he met was my favorite writer of all time; C.S. Lewis. When the Great War began, Lewis left his studies at Oxford to enlist in the British Army. He became an officer in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. Like his later friend Tolkien, Lewis was sent to the Somme. He arrived on September 25, his 19th birthday. He was wounded in the Battle of Arras and was sent to England to recuperate. After he had mended he was stationed there until the end of the war. He left the army to return to his writing and academic pursuits in December of 1919. These are only three of the many writers who have served in times of war. At times writers are viewed as people who sit on the sideline and criticize. Well these giants in my field all took to the field and were all wounded in the field. If such good writers survived the wars, it makes you wonder how many great ones didn’t?
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