Which battle did J.R.R. Tolkien survive while serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1916?

J.R.R. Tolkien survived the Battle of the Somme while serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1916. He was a second lieutenant in the 11th Service Battalion and took part in the Battle of the Somme, one of the First World War’s largest and bloodiest campaigns.

Tolkien became ill with trench fever after several months of service and was sent back to England in October 1916. Most of his close school friends known as the T.C.B.S. were killed during the war, an experience that deeply affected him.

Readers sometimes connect Tolkien’s fiction directly to individual battles or claim that Middle-earth is a straightforward allegory of the First World War. Tolkien generally resisted one-to-one allegorical readings. Nevertheless, his wartime experience, loss, friendship, landscapes, and encounters with industrial destruction formed part of the emotional and imaginative background of his later writing.