Which World War I battle did J.R.R. Tolkien fight in as a British Army officer?

J.R.R. Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme during World War I.

Tolkien served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and went to France in 1916. He took part in the Somme offensive, one of the war’s largest and bloodiest campaigns. Tolkien served as a signals officer, helping maintain communication between units in the trenches.

He became ill with trench fever in October 1916 and was sent back to England. Most of the officers in his battalion were killed during the conflict, an experience that affected him deeply. Tolkien later said that the war influenced his writing, though Middle-earth is not a direct historical allegory of World War I. Readers often connect the Dead Marshes, Mordor, and other grim landscapes with wartime experience, but Tolkien generally resisted one-to-one interpretations of his stories as allegory.