Thomas Hardy, in “Poems of War and Patriotism,” described an appalling refugee crisis in the heart of Europe a century ago. They were “pale and full of fear,” and came by the thousands to England’s shores: “From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, / No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood / Had shattered these to shards amid the gear / Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.” They were families, mostly from Belgium, caught up in the German advance during the First World War.
As with the Syrian refugee crisis today, their plight touched the conscience of the West. Two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, encountered firsthand the human suffering of the Great War and enlisted their literary imagination to confront it. Their epic works — tales of valor and sacrifice in a great conflict between Good and Evil — do not evade society’s moral obligations to the victims of war.
In October 1914, the German army entered the Belgian port of Ostend, bringing most of Belgium under German occupation. Soon tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing for Great Britain, which had entered the war to defend Belgian neutrality. Many arrived in the village of Great Bookham, where Lewis was being tutored in the classics before being sent to France to fight for king and country. He wrote to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”
