Alun Lewis was born on 1 July 1915 at Aberdare and grew up in the small village of Cwmaman in a depressed mining valley of South Wales, the eldest of four. His father was a teacher and then an education administrator, so the Lewises were a middle-class outpost amid the working-class population. This milieu had a profound effect on Alun – as did the fact that his forebears had been farm labourers and miners – and he developed a strong socialist conscience.

School and university
His left-wing leanings were put to the test when, age 11, he won a scholarship to Cowbridge Grammar, a boarding school. He was embarrassed to wear his school blazer when he returned home on holiday – the Depression had hit Cwmaman hard and Alun watched as once proud men had to scavenge for coal. Yet while he did well in sports and bloomed under the attention of a sympathetic English master, he still felt an outsider at Cowbridge and was never happy there.

When he was 17, he won another scholarship, this time to the University of Aberystwyth, where he arrived in 1932 to read history. He dabbled in left-wing politics, published his first poems, did a lot of dancing and achieved a first. He then began to worry about his ultimate career, the choice seeming to lie between what he really wanted to do – become a writer – and research and teaching.

The threat of war
Perhaps influenced by his father, he decided on the latter and, in 1935, won yet another scholarship to Manchester University to study for an MA. He hated it from the start. This was his first experience of city life and he became seriously homesick for the Welsh hills. He also found doing research tedious – in the short story 'Attitude', he described his fellow researchers at the Public Record Office in London as 'all dead, the circle of bowed heads petrified into a musty silence'.

During that time, he worked on the college magazine, attended a young historians' conference at Pontigny in France and organised a boycott of Japanese goods in protest against Japan's invasion of China and 'the horrible inhumanities that I couldn't bear thinking of'. The threat of war in Europe now became the centre of his work.

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'I'm not going to kill'
Leaving Manchester with his degree, he returned to Aberystwyth for a year to train as a teacher. From June 1938, when he had qualified, he took up temporary teaching posts and began confronting his feelings about the increasingly looming conflict. He publicly announced his pacifism in a newspaper article: 'If War Comes, Will I Fight?' In May 1939, he wrote to a friend: 'The army, the bloody, silly, ridiculous, red-faced army – in its bloody boring khaki – God save me from joining up. I shall go to the dogs like blazes – it's the only honest way.'

However, within months, his attitude had changed: 'I shall probably join up … I have a deep sort of fatalist feeling that I'll go. Partly because I want to experience life in as many phases as I'm capable of … But I don't know – I'm not going to kill. Be killed perhaps, instead.'

Gweno, the army and depression
By now he had met and fallen in love with Gweno Ellis, a teacher of German at the grammar school in Mountain Ash, a small town not far from Aberdare. By the end of the year, they had become engaged.

In the spring of 1940, as conscription inexorably approached, Lewis had to come to a decision. He toyed with the idea of joining the Merchant Navy like two of Gweno's brothers, and was on his way to take a post aboard the SS Anglo Saxon when he suddenly changed his mind and signed on with the Royal Engineers – a regiment where he was least likely to have to kill. The Anglo Saxon sailed without him – and was lost at sea.

At this time, Lewis was just emerging from serious depression. Gweno would later write:

When I knew Alun first I was often puzzled and disconcerted by a certain moodiness and preoccupation which I put down to my own failure to understand him. It was only later I realised that these were the last lingering manifestations of his first severe bout of the depressive illness which disturbed him so profoundly in his early twenties. His dejection and sense of failure prevented him from responding fully to what should have been for him a wonderful and rewarding experience at Pontigny: to his friend and tutor Christopher Cheney he wrote: 'I've lived too introspectively, and I feel just as though I've been feeding on myself until I've eaten myself up.'

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Longmoor
In May 1940, Lewis was sent to training camp at Longmoor in Hampshire. He hated military life and wrote almost daily to Gweno. His poem 'The Sentry' mirrored the bleakness of his spirit:

I have begun to die.
For now at last I know
That there is no escape
From Night.

He may not have been able to escape from 'Night' but he could escape from the camp. He would hike up to a memorial outside the former home of World War I poet Edward Thomas, who had died at Arras in 1917. In 'To Edward Thomas', Lewis wrote:

Climbing the steep path through the copse I knew
My cares weighed heavily as yours, my gift
Much less, my hope
No more than yours.
And like you I felt sensitive and somehow apart …

But by far his most famous poem from this period was 'All Day It Has Rained', in which he describes a man who passionately loves his home and wife has now become, in the confines of an army camp, numb and indifferent.

Appointed the education officer for the camp, Lewis – now with an office, fire and typewriter – prepared lecture courses on literature, international affairs and basic French. His colonel publicly denounced him as a Communist for giving a special lecture on the political background to the war.

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The infantry and marriage
In January 1941, he applied for a transfer to the Education Corps and was bitterly disappointed when he was turned down. He wrote to Gweno that he no longer considered himself a pacifist and would not take orders from those – like his superiors at Longmoor – he did not respect. He decided to put in for an infantry commission and was accepted in May; he was sent to a training centre in Gloucester in June 1941.

At the end of the month, just before he was sent to an officer cadet training unit in Morecambe, he and Gweno were married. Looking back, Lewis would see this time as an essential turning point in his work, which, he felt, had suddenly matured. 'Can't make it out,' he wrote. 'Was it Gweno and the Army?'

In October, he emerged from Morecambe as 2nd Lieutenant Lewis with a precious month's leave. The previous July, he had heard from the publishers Allen & Unwin that his poetry collection Raider's Dawn had been accepted for publication. He spent most of his leave working on the proofs amid the calming domesticity that Gweno provided.

Officer life and desperation
Lewis was then posted to the South Wales Borderers, stationed in Suffolk. His new life as an officer came as a shock; he found himself surrounded by what he saw as mere caricatures of arrogance and insensitivity. He immediately fell into depression again. Gweno later wrote:

The effect on him was to plunge him to the depths of an unwarrantable despondency. The symptoms were always the same: the desperation on waking into the crazy machinery of an uncoordinated world – a state of mind he managed to get under control by the time he had washed and shaved and generally moved around; the lack of concentration and the feeling of utter failure and worthlessness. I don't think others noticed anything wrong. If he appeared silent and withdrawn, wasn't he, after all, the battalion poet?

This depression – which in his journal Lewis named 'my strange enemy' – lasted until the end of the following summer.

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To India
After more than two years of training, Lewis finally received his embarkation orders in October 1942 – he was going to India. When Gweno was sure that the Borderers had already sailed, she received a hurried phone call from Lewis telling her the train times for their last meeting. They had less than 18 hours together. Forty-seven years later, Gweno remembered:

At 3.30am I woke and … and leaned over him, studying his face as he slept … There was something so angelic, so ineffable there, I felt my heart would break. I studied his high smooth forehead and the soft dark hair, his dark fringed deep-set eyes and the little lines that ran away from them, deepening when he laughed and the hazel eyes disappeared altogether. The fine skin above the beard line was slightly flushed with fever; and his dear mouth still bore a scar from some game of hockey long ago. I prayed for the safe return of my dainty duck, my dearest dear …

Lewis himself marked their leave-taking with his poem 'Goodbye': 'So we must say Goodbye, my darling,/And go, as lovers go, for ever.' He never saw Gweno again.

In December 1942, Lewis disembarked at Bombay and soon arrived at his posting at Nira, near Poona. While out on patrol, he underwent what he called 'an intuition' at a Buddhist shrine, which made a significant impression on him. He wrote in his journal: 'The whole mood was one of humility without submission, of being accepted without any conscious offer … It was a service of perfect freedom, a sense of infinite space to be in, just to be in.'

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Injury and Frieda
In his fourth week at Nira, Lewis broke his jaw during a football match and was sent to the military hospital at Poona for an operation and a month's recuperation (complicated when he contracted dysentery). The pain of his injury, the surgery, the general unreality of life in hospital and his direct contact with soldiers wounded by the Japanese over the border in Burma led to his writing 'Burma Casualty':

And he lay in the lightness of the ward
Thinking of all the lads the dark enfolds
So secretly.
And yet a man may walk
Into and through it, and return alive.
Why had his friends all stayed there, then?

As time passed, Gweno and Wales began to fade in his memory, despite the fact that he kept up a constant correspondence with his wife, family and friends. Gweno later wrote that he eventually succumbed to the same weakness as his military colleagues who had 'found solace and release in the willing arms of Eurasian girls or bored and discontented expatriates'.

The focus of Lewis's attention was Mrs Frieda Ackroyd, whose elegant home was in the southern Indian hills. He fell in love with her during one week before her husband returned and she sent him packing. To Gweno, he 'wrote extravagantly of the "Now" in which he was living, with "no Past and no Future". That "I must go where the winds and currents take me".'

He found it difficult to reconcile his love for his wife with his deep feelings for Frieda. To the latter, following their parting, he wrote about his arid inner landscape and depression, and often about death, which she says he saw as a type of fulfilment.

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'Some secret knowledge'
In August 1943, he was sent to Karachi for a two-month intelligence course. He did so well that, within three weeks, his superiors offered him a job as an instructor, which would effectively have taken him out of combat. But he refused, writing to a friend: 'I will not lecture until I have fought.' He explained himself more fully in a letter published posthumously in the book In the Green Tree:

[The soldiers] seem to have some secret knowledge that I want and will never find out until I go into action with them and war really happens to them. I dread missing such a thing; it seems desertion to something more than either me or them. When I was leaving Karachi, one of the instructors said to me, 'You're the most selfish man I've ever met, Lewis. You think the war exists for you to write books about it.' I didn't deny it, though it's all wrong. I hadn't the strength to explain what is instinctive and categorical in me, the need to experience. The writing is only a proof of the sincerity of the experience, that's all.

In November, Lewis was back in hospital at Poona for a short time, suffering from a bronchial ailment. This triggered his latest – and last – bout of depression, but this time, it lasted only a few months. By the end of December, he was noticing the first signs of recovery:

I'm beginning to free myself at last: yes, I'm beginning to be free. Not of time, not of work, not of muddles, but of the one destroying burden, despair. In a couple of days I'll be waking up without knowing the knife is in my heart. What a relief it'll be.

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In Burma
On 13 February, Lewis's unit finally moved to a reserve position in Burma to await orders to proceed to the front line against the Japanese. Still fighting with his belief that it was wrong to kill, he wrote endlessly every night – letters to his family and Frieda – and hardly sleeping. In his last letter to Gweno, at the end of February, he wrote:

The long self-torture I've been through is resolving itself now into a discipline of the emotions and hopes of you and me … I feel my grasp is broader and steadier than it's been for a long time. I hope it's true, because that's how I want to be: and the rest of me is invulnerable. I want you to know that.

As an intelligence officer, he could have stayed safely at headquarters, but he repeatedly asked to be sent to fight. His commanding officer finally gave way.

An accidental death?
Lewis was ordered to the Goppa Pass in the Mayu Range, where his company occupied a defensive position 1,000 feet up in the jungle-covered mountains. On 5 March 1944, the 28-year-old Lewis was ordered to take out his patrol at 9am. After the stand-to parade shortly after 5.30am, he shaved and, leaving his batman to sort out his equipment, he left to go to the latrine, carrying a loaded revolver as military orders demanded.

What happened next remains a mystery. According to the war diary of the 6th Battalion, the latrine was at the bottom of a steep bank, Lewis fell heavily in his hurry to get there and he accidently shot himself in the head. This was also the conclusion reached by a military court of enquiry. Others have since suggested that he committed suicide.

His batman found him at once, still alive. He died six hours later at the casualty clearing station at Bawli and was buried in the small military cemetery there (his body was later interred at Taukkyan Cemetery near Rangoon).

Two days later, Gweno received a pre-booked birthday greetings cable from him: 'Many happier returns. Dearest love. Alun'

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