Join me where CS Lewis almost died in WWI France
- Douglas Bond
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley died in LA of an LSD overdose, JFK died in Dallas from an assassin's bullet to the head. And on the same day at The Kilns near Oxford, C. S. Lewis's devoted brother Warnie brought a cup of tea to his ailing younger brother. Moments later, Warnie heard a clattering fall. Lewis had tried to get out of bed but had collapsed. He died of kidney failure. "Men must endure their going hence," was the Shakespeare quotation from the calendar on the day Lewis's mother had died many years before when he was nine. Warnie had the words chiseled on his brother's grave marker in Holy Trinity churchyard in Headington Quarry where you can see them today. Eclipsed by the high-profile deaths of the author of Brave New World and an American president, in the drenching November rain, only a handful of friends showed up for Lewis's funeral and burial.
But Lewis (called Jack by his friends) had a near-death experience many years before while he served as a teen 2/Lt in the Somerset Light Infantry in France in the trenches of WWI. April 15, 1918 at Mont-Bernenchon, near Arras, France, an artillery shell whistled louder and closer than the rest. Then it hit. Erupting in a deafening explosion, the shrapnel instantly killed Jack’s friend, who had been a father figure to him. And it hit Jack. He wrote, “The moment just after I had been hit… I found that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death.” Perhaps at the field hospital at Etaples, perhaps at a convalescent camp back in England on the Salisbury Plain, embittered by his experience, then-atheist Jack began writing a poem:
Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.
But God was at work in his soul. His writing would change dramatically as a result. He tells us later that he had "endless arguments" with theists and Christian officers in those trenches. I give substance to those arguments in the rising action in my historical fiction book WAR IN THE WASTELAND. The France Bond Tour will trace many of the places that are settings for this book, as well as many others. This tour wins the prize for "Finest Cuisine," though it is a close call with other tours. Visit the link at bondbooks.net/france-tour to learn more. Deep early registration discount ends 11/27.
Douglas Bond is author of more than thirty-five books (including his newest, INFANT HOLY INFANT LOWLY Advent Family Worship with the Carols of Christmas), leader of church history tours in Europe (Bond France Tour in 2026), editor, father of six, and doting grandfather of ten and counting.
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