It took five months for nineteen-year-old Jack to get better in that hospital. When the fever weakened and his strength returned, Jack was back at the front lines for the battle that would change his life. On April 15, 1918, Jack Lewis and his regiment were part of the British offensive attacking German defenses near Arras. Bullets whizzed past. Bravery mixed with cowardice as idealistic and frightened young men fought for freedom, defining courage not by being free of fear but by fighting in spite of the fear.
Seven days of that battle were shaped by blood and shattered bones, collapsed buildings, and smoking piles of rubble. It was a nightmarish world. By the end of the battle, the Somerset Infantry had taken the village of Riez du Vinage and captured sixty German soldiers. On that cold April morning, a British shell was shot toward the Germans, but it fell short, scattering its lethal power at Clive Staples Lewis, his mate Laurence Johnson, and Sergeant Harry Ayres, a man who had become very much like a father to Jack. Sergeant Ayres took the brunt of the explosion and Laurence also fell. Pieces of shrapnel bit into Jack’s body.
Jack crawled through mud and dirt, through debris and bodies, to find his way to a stretcher bearer for his sergeant and mate. He wasn’t a hero; he was another soldier trying not to die by bullet or bomb. Jack was whisked away to a hospital in ?taples. Those jagged scraps of a British shell made to wound the enemy were lodged in Jack’s body: his left arm, his leg, and most dangerously, his chest.
Laurence and the sergeant were dead. Jack survived, but even as he was taken to Liverpool to heal, he could not reckon with the fact that had any of them switched places, if he had been two steps to the left or right, or if Harry or Laurence had walked away, the grim and miserable outcome would have been different.
In that moment, life made no sense. There was no plan or rhyme or reason, no goodness or mercy or great love.
Jack took his anguish to the page and to poetry.
*
When Megs looks up from the pages, there are tears in her eyes.
“Why are you crying?” George takes his hand from below the hospital sheet and touches her fingers. “He lived and went home and attended Oxford just as you do, and then he wrote all these books and—”
“But all the terrible things he had to go through. The misery in our world.” Megs looks around the hospital room as if her eyes are cataloging all the terrible things she is thinking.
“Yes, I know.” George watches her face as she tries to stop the tears. “Tell me what else.”
She glances at the pages and a tear drops, spreading the ink of a word into a blue blob. George knows she’s crying about him, and about loss.
She clears her throat before she tells him. “That mate of his that I told you about at the beginning? The one he met in training?”
“Paddy,” he tells her.
“They promised that they would take care of each other’s family if one or the other died. And Paddy . . .”
“Died,” George finished for her.
“Yes, and Mr. Lewis has been taking care of Paddy’s mother and sister all this time. Her name is Mrs. Moore, but he calls her Minto. Paddy’s sister is Maureen, and now she’s married and the mother is in a nursing home. He visits Minto every. Single. Day.”
“Loyalty,” George says. “That’s in the book.”
“Yes.” She nods. “Loyalty.”
A nurse enters the hospital room, bustling about George and Megs, tucking and checking and fixing. George ignores her, speaking to his sister. “Did Jack go right back to university?”
“Yes. And he eventually graduated with firsts in Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and English. Not too shabby for a boy who almost wasn’t admitted. And”—she smiles as if the war was finally fading in her mind—“that book of poetry he wrote during the war? He published it.”
George sits up straighter. “That was his first book?”
“Yes, it was. He published it under the name of Clive Hamilton.”
“Who is Hamilton?”
“It was his mother’s maiden name.”
“Oh, something wonderful out of something awful.” George lies back and feels as full of story as if he’d been given a huge meal of something so satisfying that he could drift off to sleep without worry.
Seventeen
Answers Without Answers
I’m back in Oxford for only one reason: to get more stories for George. Michaelmas term has ended and students have gone home, but Mr. Lewis has invited me to his tutor rooms at Magdalen College. As I walk up High Street, the sky is blue and cloud-free.
I cannot wait until after holiday to hear more from Mr. Lewis, because . . . what if . . .
I try not to allow myself to think about the what-if. After one night in the hospital, George returned home, but there was nothing new: no cure, no hope, real or even false.
I pass through the imposing wooden gates of Magdalen with trepidation. Although I am invited, the sheer lack of women students at Magdalen makes me feel like I am trespassing, breaking some kind of unwritten rule about entering by the gates without a secret password.
I take long strides and then begin to walk across the sprawling frost-tinged lawn between the main building and the New Building where Mr. Lewis’s study is perched on the second floor. New means it was built in 1733, two hundred seventeen years ago. One side of the wide stone edifice is snuggled near to the River Cherwell and Addison’s Walk, and the other to the front of the college at the street. In front of it lies a lawn so beautiful I want to roll around on it, but that wouldn’t be proper, and I am long past rolling on icy grass. I spy two deer in the distant field.
“Megs!”
I glance around and can’t spot anyone, then I hear it again.
A thought soars across my mind: how lovely it is when someone, out of nowhere, calls your name. You can be going about your business with your mind fluttering and thinking its thoughts, and the call of your name can make your heart rise.
I look up, and a hand waves out of a window. Shifting, I lift my hand and shield my eyes from the afternoon sun. Padraig! The wind animates his red curls.
“Ahoy, there!” he hollers.
I laugh and call back, “Ahoy! Are we on a ship?”
“Where ye headed?” he asks with a poor pirate accent.
“To the treasure,” I say, pointing to the New Building, surprising myself with this giddy greeting. There I am, standing on the lawn of Magdalen College and playing verbal games with this red-haired boy who makes my stomach feel as if a swarm of bees have burst from their hive. Padraig makes me think of things I’ve only heard silly girls talk about.
“Ah, I’m betting you have another meeting with the maker of Aslan.”
I smile at him, and he leans farther out—too far, for an image of him falling to the ground swoops through my mind.
“Stay there!” he says.
Then he’s gone. But I stay, looking twice at my watch although only seconds pass. I don’t want to be late for Mr. Lewis.
Padraig appears, bounding like a deer across the lawn in his jacket with the Magdalen crest open over a waistcoat and blue trousers. When he reaches me, he stops dead short, almost running me over. “Megs Devonshire, fancy meeting you here.”
I smile. “You’re going to freeze without your coat. What are you doing?”