A few days after the Great War Armistice, C.S. Lewis wrote to his father from the army depot where he was convalescing from battle injuries: “As to the great news which is uppermost in our minds, I can only echo what you have already said. The man who can give way to mafficking at such a time is more than indecent - he is mad. I remember five of us at Keble, and I am the only survivor: I think of Mr Sutton, a widower with five sons, all of whom have gone. One cannot help wondering why.” / A veteran of the trenches, Lewis knew something of what Siegfried Sassoon called 'the hell where youth and laughter go'. He had witnessed 'horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses'. His own wounds came from a mortar that exploded in his trench during the Battle of Arras, killing the man next to him and spattering Lewis with metal, parts of which he carried around in his body for the rest of his life. But it was not just the trauma of the First World War that Lewis had suffered by the time of the Armistice. He had lost his mother when he was nine and then endured a deeply disturbing period at school under a sadistic headmaster who was later certified insane. All these experiences, taken together, meant that before he was twenty years old, Lewis had been subject to pains that many people would be unlikely to encounter in a lifetime.