I was initially excited for this chapter--battle, siege, battering-rams, thunder, lightning, cavalry charges, orcs and slaughter--what's not to like? In practice, however, Helm's Deep, like warfare in general, was kind of a slog to get through. I often had difficulty following the action. I don't necessarily mean that as a knock against it; having recently survived the Battle of Britain and the Nazi siege of England, I doubt Tolkien had a romantic bone in his body concerning war.
Here, all is confusion, chaos, darkness, doubt, and death. Yes, there is that friendly competition between Legolas and Gimli in how many orcs they can slay, but frankly their little rivalry smacks less of heroic gallantry than of the gallows humor soldiers must develop to keep their sanity. And yes, we also have Aragorn's grand-standing speechifying before the hosts of the Uruk-hai; but in that moment Aragorn draws his nobility from his defiance in the face of the senseless carnage, not from any intrinsic virtue in participating in it.
And yes, the battle does in fact end in a resounding, unambiguous victory for the good guys, the first we've encountered throughout this series, as the Riders of Rohan ride out gallantly at dawn and Gandalf arrives just in the nick of time with reinforcements. But what of that? America also entered the war at last and helped England defeat the Nazis once and for all--all of which did not make the whole ordeal any less traumatizing, destructive, or wasteful.
Even the absolute best case result of any battle, Tolkien seems to imply, is still a slog of madness and death. The relief at the end of the chapter is derived not just from the defeat of the orcs, but from the fact that war itself has paused. Because for all our bloviating about the duty and glory of warfare and supporting the troops, no soldier in actual combat spends more than 5 minutes in battle without wishing they were literally anywhere else.
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