by PAUL HUARD
The barrage of artillery fire was supposed to keep the Germans in their trenches while soldiers of the Somerset Light Infantry staged a counter-attack near the French town of Riez du Vinage on April 15, 1918.
It was all part of the Spring Offensive, a massive redeployment of German soldiers to the Western Front after Russia withdrew from the Great War.
Like so many grand plans of the war, the offensive was supposed to break the stalemate on the front and provide some kind of pathway to victory—whatever that would be.
Soon, the German artillery returned fire. Creeping forward with his company was 2nd Lt. Clive Staples Lewis, an Irishman who could have avoided serving in the British Army but who never even considered sitting out the war.
A shell exploded—whether it was German or British is a matter of debate—instantly killing a nearby sergeant and peppering Lewis with shrapnel. He was severely wounded when the metal shards lodged in his left wrist, left leg and upper left ribs, the third piece puncturing his left lung.
“Just after I was hit, I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death,” Lewis later wrote. “I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either.”
The Lewis who crawled away from the carnage was not yet the C.S. Lewis of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. Then, he was like so many others who fought in World War I—just another wounded soldier desperate not to bleed to death.