Which wartime battle wounded C.S. Lewis while he served as a British Army officer?

The Battle of Arras wounded C.S. Lewis while he served as a British Army officer during World War I. He was injured in April 1918 during the German Spring Offensive near the French village of Riez du Vinage.

Lewis served in the Somerset Light Infantry and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Shrapnel from a British shell wounded him, killing his sergeant and another officer nearby. He recovered in hospital and was later discharged from the army in December 1918 after the war ended.

The battle is sometimes confused with the Somme or Passchendaele because Lewis served on the Western Front during the same conflict in which those campaigns occurred. Arras was a major series of battles in northern France, with the 1917 offensive and the 1918 fighting both associated with the city and region. Lewis’s wartime experiences influenced later reflections on suffering, friendship, and faith.