World War I
In 1914, the United Kingdom entered World War I. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to immediately volunteer for the British Army. Instead, Tolkien entered a programme wherein he delayed enlisting until completing his degree in July 1915. He was then commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers.[47] He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for eleven months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained, "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."[48] Tolkien was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on 4 June 1916. His departure from England on a troop transport inspired him to write his poem, The Lonely Isle.[49] He later wrote, "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."[50]
After training as a signals officer, Tolkien arrived at the Somme. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, Tolkien participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig Salient. According to the memoirs of the Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers:
On one occasion I spent the night with the Brigade Machine Gun Officer and the Signals Officer in one of the captured German dugouts ... We dossed down for the night in the hopes of getting some sleep, but it was not to be. We no sooner lay down than hordes of lice got up. So we went round to the Medical Officer, who was also in the dugout with his equipment, and he gave us some ointment which he assured us would keep the little brutes away. We anointed ourselves all over with the stuff and again lay down in great hopes, but it was not to be, because instead of discouraging them it seemed to act like a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour.[51]
Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. To get around the British Army's postal censorship, the Tolkiens developed a secret code for his letters home. By using the code, Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front.
On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien came down with trench fever, a disease carried by lice, which were common in the dugouts. Tolkien was invalided to England on 8 November 1916.[52] Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the T.C.B.S., who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the same battle when a German artillery shell landed on a first aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following Tolkien's return to England.
Tolkien might well have been killed himself, but he had suffered from health problems and had been removed from combat multiple times.[