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In the Cambridge Review obituary of C. S. Lewis, the anonymous author wrote: "It is Chaucer's Knight … who comes most often to mind when one remembers C. S. Lewis. … He was a chivalric figure, and his imagination ran most richly in the forms of chivalry and adventure." As a medievalist, Lewis was intimately acquainted with the tradition of chivalry and knightly courage, and, indeed, in some ways he embodied that tradition himself. The knight, in Lewis's view, was not a dead ideal, but a real possibility even in the modern world. Lewis thought and wrote a great deal about martial and military matters, both in his imaginative works and in his nonfiction. This is not surprising when one remembers that he lived through two World Wars and served as a soldier in the first. He volunteered for active service in the Great War (as an Irishman, he could not be conscripted), joining the army in June 1917. He arrived in the trenches of France later that year on November 29 (his 19th birthday) and served for six months before being wounded by friendly fire during the Battle of Arras in spring 1918. He was invalided back to Eng lan and spent six months convalescing. In sum, one–and–a hal years of his life were spent as a soldier: first training for war, then fighting in war, then recovering from war. Lewis abandoned his childhood faith several years before becoming a soldier. He did not return to Christianity for more than a decade after the end of the Great War. However, his willingness to fight in the armed forces did not stem from his atheism. Both during his period of unbelief and during his years as a practicing Christian, Lewis thought military service was justifiable. It was not pleasant—in fact, it was in many ways appalling and repulsive—but that did not automatically mean that it was wrong. In promoting knightliness rather than pacifism as the correct response to war, Lewis shows his determination to help his readers think through this difficult issue and focus on what he believed was real (though unpleasant), rather than turning to a fanciful but more palatable alternative.

Lewis once explained his views to a pacifist society in Oxford (the address now published as "Why I Am Not a Pacifist"). He argued that although war was highly disagreeable, it could not be shown never to have done any good. Referring to his own wartime service, he reasoned that "if a Germanised Europe in 1914 would have been an evil, then the war which prevented that evil was, so far, justified."

Of course, there were many examples of useless wars; mere were even more examples of wars which tailed to do all the good that the leaders claimed they would achieve. But some wars served—at least in part—a good purpose. Lewis gave his address in 1940, near the start of World War II. By the end of that conflict, in 1945, the evil of Nazi tyranny had been defeated. Despite the terrible cost of defeating Hitler, Lewis believed that a pacifist surrender to Nazism would have been a greater failure than all the failings that were involved in tackling it with armed force. As early as 1933, Lewis had understood the true nature of Hitler, calling him"as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty."

Besides arguing that some wars were useful and legitimate, Lewis claimed that many respectable human authorities defended the right to go to war—including Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and Virgil. Furthermore, many Christian authorities defended the right of the Christian to do the same. Lewis found approval of the use of force in the writings of the apostles Paul and Peter, as well as in the works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Cranmer Lewis did not adopt his martial views lightly; he remembered the trenches too well to do that. He told his pacifist audience: All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat thirst and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the galleys, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil—every evil except dishonor…

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