This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard.

At 7 a.m. on July 1, 1916, the British Army unleashed a hellish assault against German positions on the Western Front in France, along the River Somme. The roar was so loud that it was heard in London, nearly 200 miles away. The barrage​—​about 3,500 shells a minute​—​was designed to obliterate the deepest dugouts and severely compromise German artillery and machine-gun power. Crossing No Man’s Land, that dreadful death zone stretching between opposing enemy trenches, would be a song.

Thus, at 7:30 a.m., nearly a hundred thousand British troops​—​to the sound of whistles, drums, and bagpipes​—​climbed out of their trenches and attacked. Like other great battles, this one was supposed to break the back of the German Army and hasten the end of the war. But the Germans had endured the pounding and were waiting, guns poised, for the British infantry. “We didn’t have to aim,” said a German machine-gunner. “We just fired into them.” Before the day was over, 19,240 British soldiers lay dead, nearly twice that number wounded. Most were killed in the first hour of the attack, many within the first minutes.

July 1, 1916, marks the deadliest single day in British military history. Sir Frank Fox, a regimental historian, summarized the scene this way: “In that field of fire nothing could live.” The Battle of the Somme would rage on, inconclusively, until November 18, dragging over a million men into its vortex of suffering and death.

Twenty-four-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien, a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force, was among their number​—​an experience that would shape the course of his life and literary career. Tolkien spent nearly four months in the trenches of the Somme valley, often under intense enemy fire. As he recalled years later: “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel its full oppression.” A hundred years hence and the Somme offensive still casts its oppressive shadow across the landscape of the West. It symbolizes not only the human tragedy of an ill-conceived war but the fearsome cost of a mistaken idea: the notion of human perfectibility.

The Dogma of Human Progress

By the start of the 20th century, attitudes about war and what it could accomplish were bound up with a singular, overarching idea: the myth of progress. Perhaps the most deeply held view in the years leading up to the First World War was that Western civilization was marching inexorably forward, that human nature was evolving and improving​—​that new vistas of political, cultural, and spiritual achievement were within reach.

Herbert Spencer, who converted Darwin’s theory of evolution into a social doctrine, had much to do with this. So did the success of the scientific and industrial revolutions. “Between 1900 and 1914, technological, social and political advances swept Europe and America on a scale unknown in any such previous timespan,” writes British historian Max Hastings, “the blink of an eye in human experience.”

Confidence in human progress led some to believe that, with the help of modern technologies, wars could be fought with minimal cost in life and treasure. Others argued that rational Europeans would soon dispense with war altogether. In The Great Illusion, British writer Norman Angell claimed that the Industrial Revolution​—​by creating economic growth and interdependence​—​had changed the dynamic among nation-states. The great industrial nations of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States were “losing the psychological impulse to war,” he wrote, just as they abandoned the impulse to kill their neighbors over religion. “The least informed of us realizes that the whole trend of history is against the tendency for men to attack the ideals and the beliefs of other men.”

First published in 1909, The Great Illusion became a runaway bestseller. The book seemed to speak to a deep and widely shared aspiration: the “perpetual peace” imagined by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Novelist H. G. Wells recalled the mood: “I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation​—​in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilized world​—​thought that war was dying out. So it seemed to us.”

Such a view was congenial to religious leaders, especially those uncomfortable with Christianity’s doctrine of the fall from grace. On the eve of the outbreak of the war, Britain’s National Peace Council, a coalition of religious and secular peace organizations, foresaw an era of international harmony. The 1914 edition of its Peace Yearbook offered this astonishing prediction:

Peace, the babe of the nineteenth century, is the strong youth of the twentieth century; for War, the product of anarchy and fear, is passing away under the growing and persistent pressure of world organization, economic necessity, human intercourse, and that change of spirit, that social sense and newer aspect of worldwide life which is the insistent note, the Zeitgeist of the age.

This “change of spirit” was heralded from virtually every sector of society. Scientists, educators, industrialists, salesmen, politicians, preachers​—​all agreed on the upward flight of humankind. Each breakthrough in medicine, science, and technology confirmed it. Every invention and innovation was offered up as evidence, from Marconi’s radio transmissions to the Maxim machine gun. Darwin’s theory about biological change had ripened into a social assumption​—​a dogma​—​about human improvement, even perfection.

Or so it seemed to Tolkien and to his Oxford friend, C. S. Lewis, also a war veteran. “I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt​—​I still feel​—​its almost perfect grandeur,” Lewis confessed. “It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.” Importantly, the triumph of science and technology left no meaningful role for faith. Science, not religion, was driving human achievement. “Man was responsible for his own earthly destiny,” writes historian Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind. “His own wits and will could change his world. Science gave man a new faith​—​not only in scientific knowledge, but in himself.”

A Glimpse of Mordor

Ironically, the tools of science that produced such optimism created the conditions that would smash it to pieces. Mortars, machine guns, poison gas, the mass production of artillery, the mechanized transport of troops and armaments: In the hands of military planners and politicians, science increased exponentially the destructive power of war.

The result was an assault on man and nature on a scale never before experienced in the West. When the Battle of the Somme was finally called off in November 1916, much of the Somme valley​—​a verdant mix of farms and forests—​was desolate. Trees had been reduced to blackened sticks. Fields and crops were swallowed up by waves of mud and massive craters, filled with water. The stench of explosives and unburied corpses hung in the air.

Tolkien served as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers until trench fever took him out of the war. It was during this period that he laid the foundation for his mythology about an epic struggle for Middle-earth. Writing from his hospital bed, Tolkien produced a series of stories (later published as The Book of Lost Tales), which would inform his major works: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. Each involves a violent contest between good and evil​—​and in each there are hints of the horrors of the Somme.

In The Lord of the Rings, Middle-earth is threatened by Sauron, the dark lord of Mordor, who seeks to possess the Ring of Power. The story centers on Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, hobbits from the Shire, and their quest to destroy the ring and save Middle-earth. As they approach Mordor, they encounter a brooding and lifeless wasteland. “The gasping pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear,” Tolkien wrote. “The sun was up, walking among clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled.” Passing through the marshes, Sam catches his foot and falls on his knees, “so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mire.” Looking intently into the muck, he is startled. “There are dead things,” he exclaims, “dead faces in the water!”

Historian Sir Martin Gilbert, author of a definitive account of the Somme offensive, interviewed Tolkien in the 1960s about his life as a soldier. He notes that Tolkien’s description of the dead marshes matches precisely the macabre experience of soldiers at the Somme: “Many soldiers on the Somme had been confronted by corpses, often decaying in the mud, that had lain undisturbed, except by bombardment, for days, weeks and even months.” In a letter to L. W. Forster written on December 31, 1960, Tolkien confirmed the connection: “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to Morannon [Mordor] owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”

Although Tolkien never intended to write a trench memoir, we may suspect that memories of combat informed his description of the “Siege of Gondor” in The Lord of the Rings:

Yet their Captain cared not greatly what they did or how many might be slain: their purpose was only to test the strength of the defense and to keep the men of Gondor busy in many places. All before the walls on either side of the Gate the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet still driven as by a madness more and more came up.

Hundreds of antiwar novels, memoirs, and works of poetry were published in the 1920s and 1930s, helping to create an image of war as inherently futile and irrational. The poems of Wilfred Owen, who was wounded three times before being killed in battle, offered no place for heroism: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” T. S. Eliot, in his epic 1922 poem, The Waste Land, seemed to speak for many in the post-war generation: “I think we are in rats’ alley / where the dead men lost their bones.”

For these authors, the First World War exposed the myth of progress for what it was​—​a monstrous illusion about the “civilized” West. The advanced “Christian” nations of Europe had engaged in a mutual suicide pact, leaving nearly 10 million soldiers dead and millions more grievously wounded. A frightening share of young men were emotionally debilitated by trench warfare and committed to asylums. “When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August, “and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.”

The disillusionment of the postwar generation found an outlet​—​in literature, the arts, philosophy, religion, and politics. Just consider some of the books published in the first years after the conflict: The End of a World (1920), Social Decay and Degeneration (1921), The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (1923), The Twilight of the White Races (1926), and Oswald Spengler’s sweeping work, The Decline of the West (1918). “We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization,” Spengler wrote, “instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture.”

The Great War seemed to confirm a fatal weakness in liberal democracy, creating an openness to all kinds of utopian and illiberal schemes. When the Communist International held its first World Congress in 1919, for example, it drew delegates from 26 countries, including the United States. Meanwhile, European fascism emerged first in Italy, a society in tatters. A huge number of Mussolini’s “Blackshirts”​—​his 40,000-strong militia that marched on Rome and seized power in 1922​—​were disenchanted veterans. Within a decade, fascist parties and regimes took root all over Europe.

One of the most striking effects of the myth of progress was that, at the outbreak of war in 1914, many expected social and spiritual regeneration. Church leaders preached that war would advance the ideals of Christianity and democracy, that it would give birth to an epoch of peace and righteousness. Just as the earlier crusaders had unified Europe, wrote London minister Joseph Fort Newton, “so this, the greatest humanitarian crusade in history, will unify the world.” The progressive vision, rooted in secular idealism, had infiltrated European (and American) Christianity.

The catastrophic failure of this worldview created a backlash​—​an animus against the old religious orthodoxies. Christian faith and morality became two more casualties of the war. When T. S. Eliot was baptized into the Church of England in 1927, Virginia Woolf, a member of London’s literary set, was appalled. “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward,” she wrote to a friend. “I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”

The door was thrust open to substitute religions​—​from fascism to Freudian psychology to Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy. Gilbert Murray, in his 1929 book The Ordeal of This Generation, bemoaned the “large and outspoken rejection” of Christianity. The false prophets of progress had discredited themselves and the values and institutions they claimed to defend. “The Age of Progress ends in a barbarism such as shocks a savage,” wrote Paul Bull, a former war chaplain. “The Age of Reason ends in a delirium of madness.”

Tolkien’s Heroic Vision

All of this makes Tolkien’s literary aims profoundly countercultural, even subversive. Like no previous war, the Great War assaulted the concepts of heroism, valor, and virtue. The helplessness of the individual soldier, ravaged by the instruments of modernity, was a recurring motif in the postwar period. Tolkien rebelled against this outlook. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, he was at home in the worlds of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien sought to retrieve something of the medieval Christian tradition, the story of the great and noble quest.

Herein lies the signal achievement of his epic trilogy. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien recovers the mythic concept of the heroic struggle against evil​—​and reinvents it for the modern mind. “To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate,” wrote C. S. Lewis in an early review. “Nothing quite like it was ever done before.”

How did he accomplish it? Although Tolkien’s work appears to lack a religious framework​—​there are no prayers or deities—​its characters are conscious of a universal Moral Law to which they must give account. “How shall a man judge what to do in such times,” asks Éomer. “As he ever has judged,” replies Aragorn. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.” Lewis declared this to be “the basis of the whole Tolkienian world.”

In the conflict between Mordor and Middle-earth, every soul is tested. Every creature must choose sides in a titanic struggle between darkness and light; moral indifference is never an option. In Tolkien’s vision, heroic sacrifice for a just cause​—​even against terrible odds​—​carries its own transcendent meaning.

The vital thing is to remain faithful to the quest, regardless of the costs and perils. Frodo’s mission is to carry the Ring of Power to the fires of Mount Doom and destroy it​—​before it can destroy him. “I am not made for perilous quests,” Frodo exclaims. “Why was I chosen?” Replies Gandalf: “You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

Here again Tolkien’s experience at the Somme worked on his imagination. Where did Tolkien get the idea for his hobbits? From being in close company with the ordinary English soldier and witnessing his loyalty and determination under fire. War correspondent Philip Gibbs, a critic of the military leadership, confessed his astonishment at the discipline and valor of the British Expeditionary Force, praising “individual courage beyond the natural laws of human nature as I thought I knew them once.” Tolkien explained that he made his hobbits small in size to reflect the hidden virtues of his fellow soldiers. “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war,” he wrote, “and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

The Somme offensive left about 1.5 million men dead and wounded among the Allied and Central Powers, making it one of the most lethal battles in history. And to what end? In military terms, the campaign achieved almost nothing, since most of the British soldiers were killed on ground held by the British before the assault began. And yet the war continued for another two years, killing, maiming, and debilitating an entire generation. “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface,” wrote Winston Churchill, “and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization.”

In this sense, the Somme represents the collision of facile dreams of human advancement with the loathsome limitations of human nature. For Tolkien, it marked the funeral of a great myth. Whatever illusions of human progress and perfectibility he may have nurtured in youth vanished into a storm of steel and death. Perhaps this helps explain the tragic dimension of Tolkien’s story: the failure of Frodo to willingly destroy the Ring of Power. In the end, the hero is not indomitable. “But one must face the fact,” Tolkien explained, “the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures.”

The hero, and his quest, must be redeemed by an act of grace. Here is an epic myth, an ancient story, which the modern world still longs to hear.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.