page_title: F. L. Lucas
section_title: Early life and the War
hierarchical_section_title: F. L. Lucas / Biographical / Early life and the War
caption_attribution_description: English: Frank Laurence Lucas, 2Lt, 7th Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment, 1914
context_page_description: Frank Laurence Lucas was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.
  He is now best remembered for his scathing 1923 review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and for his book Style, an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' was for over fifty years a standard introduction. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume old-spelling Complete Works of John Webster, the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt the Younger, itself an inferior copy of Dyce. Eliot called Lucas "the perfect annotator", and subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster.
  Lucas is also remembered for his anti-fascist campaign in the 1930s, and for his wartime work at Bletchley Park, for which he received the OBE.
context_section_description: F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's, where his father F. W. Lucas (1860–1931) was headmaster, and from 1910 at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw (1843–1917) in his last year before retirement. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1913 to read for the Classical Tripos, adding the Pitt Scholarship and the Porson Prize in 1914. In January 1914 he was elected Apostle – the last Apostle elected before the War – coming under the influence of G. E. Moore. Believing Cambridge threatened with the fate of Louvain, he volunteered, aged 19, in October 1914 and was commissioned in November, serving from 1915 as second lieutenant in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France. From August 1915 he was in the Somme trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz; he was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. "One simply gapes at the gigantic capriciousness of things," he wrote to John Maynard Keynes in October of that year, "waiting our own turn to disappear in the Cyclops' maw."  He returned to the front as lieutenant in January 1917, went into battle near Grandcourt on 17 February in the Ancre Offensive, was mentioned in despatches on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war-hospitals. By September 1917 he felt that the cause of honour and justice had been lost in the lust of Victory  ("We were too ready to go on fighting without offering terms" ). Passed fit for garrison duty at Chatham, he sought the help of fellow-Apostle Keynes to return to France, and from August 1918 to the Armistice he was Staff lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps (Third Army HQ), examining German prisoners near Bapaume and Le Quesnoy. His life hung in the balance in November 1918 shortly after the Armistice, when his lung wounds reopened in the influenza pandemic. He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell-walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning [1919] on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blucathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience."
caption: Lucas in 1914
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