Tag Archives: Red Cross Military hispital

Jun 13 2026

C S LEWIS AND THE RECOVERY FROM WAR (Part 4)

Posted on by

QUALITY OF CARE

At the Endsleigh Palace Hotel Hospital in 1918, the injured C S Lewis was able to enjoy a more homely atmosphere and level of comfort.  We’re told each floor had a “still room” where “ladies” served tea and coffee in the morning and afternoon, on white china plates, with toast ready on toast racks [1]  Again, a novelist’s imagination can visualise all sort of conversations going on surreptitiously over the tea and toast!  Some of these “ladies” may well have been “Ladies” with a capital “L’ as many members of the aristocracy did this sort of war work, like Dorothy L Sayers’ fictional Lady Mary Wimsey [2].

But Lewis’ treatment included massage [3], so  I assume this was by male orderlies, but he doesn’t say.

One of the most striking things when reading articles in the British Journal of Nursing (BJN) for this period, edited by Mrs Bedford Fenwick, is the suffragette and militant tone of much of the writing.  The nurses are on the move, organising demonstrations and marches, arguing in public, doing committee work, and confronting ineptitude in high places –  they want their rightful place!  They want proper professional recognition, not just being patronised by non-medical men with titles, and the female contributors in general want to work for future peace.  They refuse to be limited to what had been called “a Woman’s Sphere”, especially as the  current needs of men were so great.

A poem published in the BJN in 1915 illustrates this well:

“They talk about a woman’s sphere

As though it had a limit;

There’s not a place in earth or heaven,

There’s not a task to mankind given,

There’s not a blessing or a woe,

There’s not a whispered yes or no,

There’s not a life, or death, or birth,

That has a feather’s weight of worth,

Without a woman in it.”

And throughout the British Journal of Nursing there are constant reminders – in reports of talks by church leaders and in the Editorial comments – that nurses need to remember that they are doing the work of Christ the Healer, to which indeed many of the nurses testify in their letters and feedback from the hospital frontlines.  As John Storrs, the Dean of Rochester, is quoted at the time as saying in an article for nurses: “Learn to love Him, and you will not fail to throw your heart into all that you do in His name and for Him”, adding that “The splendid “nerve” of the trained nurse has been one of the glories of the war.” [4]  

But, as always, these more uplifting passages in the British Journal of Nursing are interspersed with news items and advice of more down-to-earth and sobering information, such as teaching on Venereal Disease, and how to help a man who’s cut his own throat.

HOSPITAL SURROUNDINGS

Of course it was important for those who could walk well enough to get some exercise.  Lewis certainly did.  Nearby were beautiful squares of greenery surrounded by iron railings, like Gordon Square Gardens. These resemble mini-parks, which still contain loungers and walkers escaping their work or just resting today.  

Fortunately for us, we can turn to 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards’ photograph album again for a 1917 photo of the gardens as Lewis would have known them, to see that they looked almost exactly the same as today.

Lewis writes to his father on 12 June 1918 to thank him for a new brown suit and collars and ties.  He can now get out of bed and indeed has even been out a few times [6]. It feels wonderful just to have pockets without buttons and to wear a different tie everyday.  But his own valise with his kit and books from the Front has not yet arrived.

However, his first trip out of the hospital almost ended in disaster, when a lorry (driven by “some woman”) crashed into the back of his cab.  Fortunately no one was hurt, but it did make Lewis wonder about what “the fates” had in store for him, as if he wasn’t going to be allowed to be at peace [7].

It is astonishing to think that if Lewis could have travelled back in time only thirteen years he could have bumped into another future Literary Great in Gordon Square Gardens, one who would also begin a Thursday evening meeting for like-minded people to discuss their work and surrounding culture, just as Lewis was to begin the Thursday evening Inklings in Oxford.  How would Lewis have got on with the twenty two year old Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) who had moved into number 46 Gordon Square in 1904, beginning her Thursday get-togethers in 1905 with her brother Thoby and his Cambridge friends?

If Lewis had been lingering on the grass or learning to walk again along the paths of the gardens then, he could have bumped into Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, W B Yeats (one of Lewis’ poetic heroes) or E M Forster as they descended on number 46 for tea and buns and literary exaltation.  Virginia was to live in several of the local squares – Fitzroy, Brunswick, Tavistock (where she and Leonard ran the Hogarth Press for fifteen years).  The Woolfs then stayed in Mecklenburgh Square until it was bombed in 1940 (and where Dorothy L Sayers was to live in the 1921, and make it the home of her character,  the writer Harriet Vane).

But Virginia Woolf later wrote that Gordon Square had been the main HQ of the Bloomsbury Group and a place of great peace and restfulness for her.  Anyway, it’s perhaps a good thing that she and Lewis did not overlap in time whilst meandering under the trees, as their literary futures lay in very different directions.  But it is intriguing to know that another Bloomsbury Group member could have bumped into Lewis crossing the Gardens – the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes,  was by then living at number 46 in the Square as a tenant of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and so did overlap with Lewis’ time in the hospital.

The BJN tells of various events that were put on for wounded soldiers from military hospitals in London, such as tea and entertainment at the Lyceum, and an exhibition of artificial limbs at Roehampton House Hospital (these were demonstrated by an ex-soldier who would show the efficiency of his own artificial leg).  That could so easily have been of interest to Lewis but fortunately his leg wound, though it hurt a lot, was his least serious.

But he was able to send good news to his friend Arthur Greeves back in Ireland on 17 June 1918.  Lewis had been able to go to the opera on the previous Friday evening, to hear Wagner’s The Valkyrie conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Drury Lane.  The thrill of it restored feelings that he hadn’t experienced in five years.  He was obviously feeling a lot physically stronger too as, when someone in the seat in front of him kept standing up in enthusiasm during the performance, Lewis pulled him down into his seat again by his coat tails!  He was also able to see Faust.  These were presumably with Mrs Moore, judging from his letters to his father and Arthur [8].  But even though he could now walk around and explore London, there were little incidents to remind him of his invalid status, and not just the pain in his leg.  Once in Piccadilly (visiting Hatchard’s, the famous bookshop?), the bandage above his knee fell round his ankle and he had to get a taxi back to the hospital [9]. 

LEAVING THE HOSPITAL

As I descended the former hospital floor by floor, there were very few original elements of the building’s interior decor left to record.  It was now all utilitarian minimalist corridors of offices or student facilities and therefore impossible to tell what it had once been like as either a hotel or a hospital.

The only unusual item that stood out was a section of a decorative iron railing which may have been from Lewis’ time there, as it looked pretty integral to the building.

After taking my photos, I thereforeI left the building feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more that resonated with the World War One period, but exhilarated that I had penetrated a building that had once held my literary hero when he was also a war hero.

But this research did ultimately lead me to read the testimonies of so many other ‘Everymen’ and ‘Everywomen’ who struggled and suffered in this terrible War.  It was an honour to read the first-hand accounts of the sacrifice and triumphs of soldiers and nurses who fought for life side by side.  It helped me to see the experience of C S Lewis in his context and in a deeper way than from just his own self-effacing words.  I can understand more fully now how Lewis was able to find a ‘safe place’ in literature, to try to forget the horrors of what he had seen and felt, even if they did come back to haunt his dreams.  It made his subsequent achievements even more impressive as he, with others, was able to claw back and then enhance the civilisation that had seemed lost, with literary contributions of his own, and speak with renewed moral authority to his own scarred generation, and beyond.

But this is not the end of the story of 2nd Lieutenant Jack Lewis’ recovery from war.  He was to be sent next to continue his recuperation to a another Red Cross Military Hospital in the beautiful mansion called Ashton Court on the outskirts of Bristol, in the south west of England, nearer to Ireland and the sea.

Of course we all know that Lewis did indeed recover.  But perhaps, as a postscript, you will be pleased to know that 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards, whose photo album we have been sharing along the way, that he too recovered, despite losing his foot due to a grenade.  He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for saving the lives of other men, and after the Endsleigh Palace Hotel hospital he was sent to a castle by the sea on the south west coast, where of course he continued to take pictures.  He recovered sufficiently to take over the family business in Bloomsbury after the War, marry his sweetheart, and live to be eighty five!

Here is a photo of his, of soldiers recovering in Gordon Square Gardens in 1917, just as Lewis would have done. Even in sepia, one can tell how little the green space has changed in over a hundred years.

The next place in our ‘pilgrimage’ to sites where Lewis recovered from war, therefore, will be Ashton Court in Bristol.

NOTES

1]  British Journal of Nursing (BJN), Vol 55, 17 July 1915, www.rcnarchive.rcn.org.uk.

2]  Advert in BJN, Vol 60, 18 May 1918, pvii.

3]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper, Vol 1, p381.

4]  BJN, May 25, 1918, vol 70, p362.

5]  https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=2000-05-126-1  Out of Copyright.

6]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 12 June 1918, p379.

7]  Ibid.,p380.

8]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 20? June 1918, p386.

9]  Ibid., p387.

May 30 2026

C S LEWIS AND THE RECOVERY FROM WAR (PART 2)

Posted on by

ENDSLEIGH PALACE HOTEL AS MILITARY HOSPITAL

In this second part, I am now turning to my exploration inside the building that was converted from the very smart Endsleigh Palace Hotel into a Red Cross Military Hospital in the London of 1915.   It has recently become the Student Union for University College London (UCL).  What would be left of the original building as the injured officer C S Lewis would have seen it?  Or would everything from the First World War era have been removed or painted over?  And what state was Lewis in when he arrived there, at that point not world famous but just an ‘Everyman’, an injured soldier trying to survive, although perhaps not heal so well he’d be sent back to the Front Line in France?  Meanwhile there were still lots of Everyman editions of classic books for him to read…

MY TOUR OF THE BUILDING

Fortunately I had phoned ahead to make sure that it was OK for me as an alumna of UCL to tour the building, so I had no problem with the uniformed security guard inside the entrance. 

On his left was a shop with the usual student union goods for sale, including sweatshirts and hoodies, 

and to the right was Gordon’s Café, the student union place for hot drinks and sandwiches, crisps, and all the usual chocolate and snack bars without which enduring the next lecture, for most, would feel an impossibility. 

I decided to take advantage of this facility and so had a quick early lunch, all the time feeling like a middle-aged imposter amongst all the young faces.

 I did feel as though I was on a secret mission and that at any moment the security guard would change his mind and haul me out!  Although that’s probably taking ‘imposter syndrome’ a bit far.

I tried to concentrate on the building’s interior, but so far there was nothing very inspiring under all the white paint.  Definitely a utilitarian ‘health and safety’ vibe up to this point.

 But it was more important to me to see the upper floors where Lewis would have stayed.  There was a very small lift. so I thought I would go to the top floor first and work my way down by the stairs, looking in at each floor as I went.  Would the lift have been there in Lewis’ day? Quite possibly, as there were several lifts back then, including one that was large enough for stretcher cases.

EARLY FIELD HOSPITAL TREATMENT IN FRANCE

But just to backtrack a bit, Lewis had already needed hospital treatment before the more severe wounds that brought him back to England.

CSL had written to his great friend Arthur Greeves on 2 February 1918 that he had been admitted to No 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport in France.  This was with a bout of Pyrexia or ‘trench fever’, and he was very glad to be away from the Front Line [1].   He then reassured his father that the illness wasn’t much worse than ‘flu [2].  In his next letter to Arthur, he mentions reading Boswell on Johnson and the Everyman copy he bought in Oxford.

How he longs to ramble in the bookshops in ‘The Broad’ in Oxford! (Presumably he’s referring to Blackwell’s, but perhaps also Thornton’s which I remember before it closed in 2002).  He has ordered the Everyman copy of ‘The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini’ from a bookshop in London. 

He describes to his father Le Tréport as a little fishing village with cliffs and a grey sea.  He was still in the hospital on the 18th of February because, after recovering once, he then had a relapse.  He asks his father to get him a cheap edition of Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ which he’s wanted to read for a time [3]

To Arthur Greeves he writes that he is hoping for another relapse so he can stay in the hospital, but it probably won’t happen because “the gods hate me” [4].  One is tempted to think “Be careful what you wish for.”  He recommends a bookshop called ‘Ovenell’s’ on Broad Street, Oxford, where they do a good job of binding books.  He sings the praises of his Everyman version of Cellini, the thinness and crispness of the paper and the ideal size of the font and margins.

We can tell that Lewis liked a physical copy of a book that fed his senses as well as his mind.  He’s not impressed with the “piles of trash” in the hospital library but has settled on George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ for bedtime reading [5]. He is also reading and speaking as much French as he can.

LEWIS’ WOUNDS

Lewis did his best to reassure his father that he was safe when he was returned to the Front.  But then a note arrived in Belfast for his ‘Papy’ and not in Lewis’s hand, the sort of note every parent of a soldier was dreading. It was dated 16 April 1918 and said ‘Jack’ had been “slightly wounded” and was in hospital again.  The address was the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital in Étaples.  As part of the Somerset Light Infantry at the Battle of Arras, centred on Riez de Vinage, Lewis was wounded in the chest, hand and leg on the 15th April.

What were these field hospitals like?

First the wounded would be taken to a Clearing Station before being moved to a base hospital.  The wounded had a label tied to their coat with details of their injuries.  Those in danger had a red border round the label.  They also were given a small bag for any belongings [6].  Lewis complains in a letter to his father about having his uniform cut off him, which he thought was excessive but seemed common practice [7]. 

An article in The British Nursing Journal gives a summary of conditions in the Étaples field hospitals, from a report by Miss Swift, Matron-in-Chief under the Joint War Committee in 1915:

“At Étaples, St John’s Brigade Hospital, which is well-arranged in huts, with a perfect equipment, theatre, electrical department, and every modern appliance.  The wards are large and airy.  Also the Liverpool Merchants’ Hospital, which is beautifully equipped and arranged…”  [8]

There is also an article in the British Nursing Journal that describes a train journey on the ‘Rapide’ passing Étaples with a view of the immense field hospital and the new ‘game’ played by the passengers of flinging cigarettes and newspapers, chocolate and other gifts out of the windows for the medics and patients there [9].

Ironically, Lewis’ wounds were caused by his own side, a case of “friendly fire”, from a shell burst.  His brother Warren visited him, worried that the wounds were severe, so was greatly relieved to find Jack in relatively good spirits.  He found out that Jack had narrowly escaped death – the sergeant next to him had been killed.   After losing consciousness for a while, Jack had managed to crawl back to safety and was carried the rest of the way by stretcher bearers [10]. 

 But he was unconscious again by the time his uniform had been cut off by medical staff.

The BJN quotes Colonel Sir J Cantlie saying that “a soldier’s chances of recovery from wounds are usually determined by his treatment during the first half hour in which he is brought from the trenches.” [11]

Lewis writes to his father that he was hit in the back of the left hand, just above the left knee and in the left side which meant he couldn’t lie on his side.  He eye was closed from dirt for a few days but thankfully recovered [12]. The shrapnel that went into his chest worked its way further in, but he was told it could stay there for the rest of his life if need be. 

A Nursing Sister on the Western Front, at the very place where Lewis was taken to a field hospital, fills in some of the detail and atmosphere for us in May 1918:

“You would like to know how we passed through this crisis.  I hardly know where to begin to tell you of that week, when, for the first time, we saw the war, we felt the war, and we lived at the war.  The impression that it left is a numbed, indescribable feeling, a depth of sorrow, an accumulation of fury that such things are possible; a heart-breaking pity for all who have suffered and an infinite regret that we could not do more.  I see the broken, bleeding men lying in long rows, with red-dyed bandages and whitening faces, waiting to be taken into the operating room.  Magnificent heroes, every man of them, both English and French.  I saw them being rushed into battle.  I saw them brought back on stretchers.  I saw some of them ‘die for their country’, always with the same high courage…. Every day the cannons became louder and the enemy came nearer, and the thunder of them seemed to become part of ourselves; it entered our brains, and because our heads did not open, it stayed there; and even yet there are days when I hear those awful crashes, an appalling sound.  We did not go to bed; we just lay down for half an hour, when we felt too exhausted to do any more.”  [13] 

This Nurse goes on to say that she watched so many men going up to the Front Line, who might die that night, she felt she had to smile for them:

“I had a curious feeling that I was smiling at men who were going to fight and die that night, and perhaps it was the last woman’s smile some of them would see….the frightfulness of the sacrifice of their young lives is sad, sad beyond words…  Have I not seen and heard real warriors going forth to battle?”

This helps to fill in some of the emotional impact of the battle lines and the difficulties of care for the wounded, detail that we do not see in Lewis’ letters.  Public school trained boys and soldiers did not show their emotion or vulnerability if they could possibly help it [14]. But the women who shared many of the same experiences with these male combatants can fill in some of the blanks for us.  The experiences of women as nurses in such dire circumstances went on to inform political and literary life, just as much as male experience. (One example that springs to mind is from the writing of Dorothy L Sayers – not only did her character Lord Peter Wimsey suffer shell-shock from his experience at the Front, but his sister Lady Mary spent time nursing in London in the War and got personally involved in political agitation there.)   Gilchrist argues: “Larger contexts than have so far been constructed in studying Lewis need to be considered in order to understand his experiences and his response to them.” [15]  I hope this is what I’m doing to some extent by introducing the perspectives in the British Nursing Journal into the picture.  Sometimes the nurses could speak when the men couldn’t.

But even for those wounded soldiers now ‘safely’ in a field hospital, the danger was by no means over.  There is a saying ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’.  Well, that certainly applies to the situation of any one being moved from the Front to the field hospitals at Étaples.   The field hospitals themselves were bombed!  Plus there was the dangerous sea crossing over to England.

Reference to the bombing of the field hospitals in Étaples was made by Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the House of Commons.

He states that there were over 300 casualties [16]. 

The German bombers returned a week later to cause “a martyrdom of women and wounded men and hospital attendants” on Corpus Christi day when the Allies had agreed not to do any bombing [17]. 

In the House of Commons in June the numbers were given for the German attacks on our hospitals on the north coast of France from 15 May to 1 June 1918. The terrible total was that 248 had been killed and 593 wounded. [18]

Many medical staff gave their lives in order to stay with their patients who could not be moved.  They were like sitting ducks for the bombers.  Lewis himself wrote to Arthur Greeves that he was more afraid in this situation in the field hospitals when he couldn’t walk than he was in the trenches [19].

Part 3 will deal with Lewis’ experience in the Endsleigh military hospital and the surrounding area during his stay.

NOTES

1]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol 1, edited by Walter Hooper, p352.

2]  CSL, ibid., p354.

3]  ibid., p358.

4]  ibid.

5]  ibid., p360.

6]  “Take In” Day at a Casualty Clearing Station, The British Nursing Journal, Vol 55, Oct 30, 1915, p353.

7]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 14 May 1918, p368.

8]  British Nursing Journal, Vol 55, 30 October 1915, p357.

9]  BNJ Vol 55, 18 September 1915, p230.

10]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol !, 14 May 1918, p366.

11]  BNJ, Vol 60, 15 June 1918, p418.

12]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol !, 4 May 1918, p367.

13]  BNJ, Vol 60, May 1918, p348.

14]  K J Gilchrist begins his book A Morning After War: C S Lewis and World War 1 (Peter Lang, New York, 2005, p1) in the very first paragraph by stating that Lewis “obscured facts about his war service and its lingering effects”, and that Prof Don King has also pointed this out concerning Lewis’ early poetry – the main reason for this being the trauma itself and the “renewal of trauma by remembering.” (ibid., p2).

15]  ibid., p6.

16]  BNJ, Vol 60, 1 June 1918, p382.

17]  BNJ, Vol 60, 30 May, 1918, p399.

18]  BNJ, Vol 60, 15 June, 1918, p419. 

19]  CSL, Collected Letters Vol 1, 23 May 1918, p370.