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WAR AND THE WEIRD
BY
FORBES PHILLIPS
AND
R. THURSTON HOPKINS
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL,
HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD.
_Copyright
All rights reserved
1916_
Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Punctuation has been normalised. Dialect spellings have been
retained. The oe ligature is shown as [oe].
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
I. THE UNCANNY UNDER FIRE 11
II. WAR THE REVEALER 17
III. THE SOUL'S BOUNDARY LINE 21
IV. THE SPIRITUAL ENTITY 27
V. ANGELS 31
VI. FELLOWSHIP WITH THE UNSEEN 35
VII. THE WHITE COMRADE 39
FIVE SKETCHES
I. OMBOS 49
II. THE DE GAMELYN TRADITIONS 101
III. THE MILLS OF GOD 127
IV. THE STORY OF A SPY 137
V. THROUGH THE FURNACE 161
INTRODUCTION
BY FORBES PHILLIPS
I
THE UNCANNY UNDER FIRE
"Do you think there is anything in it?" He was a clean-set six-foot
specimen of English manhood, an officer of the R.F.A. wounded at Mons,
who spoke. "I mean I haven't studied these subjects much--in fact, I
haven't studied them at all. Sport is more in my line than spiritualism
and that kind of thing, but when you have experiences brought under your
very nose again and again, you cannot help thinking there must be
something in such things." He had just told me that in the last few
minutes' sleep he managed to get on the march to Mons he dreamt that he
was unable to sit his horse. The next day he was wounded inside his
right knee, not seriously, but sufficient to stop him riding for a week
or two. "I should never have thought anything more of it--I mean,
connecting the dream with the ill-luck--but in the South African
campaign there were quite remarkable instances. You see, at such times
when you are playing hide-and-seek with shrapnel, officers and men get
very chummy when we do get a spell for a talk. The Tommies give us their
confidences, and ask us all kinds of strange questions about religious
and super-natural things."
Take premonitions, for example. How shall we account for the British
soldier's actual versions of the matter? There are countless stories in
this war, in every war, of men having a warning, a sub-conscious
certainty of death. The battlefield is armed with a full battery of
shot, which thrill with human interest and have around them a halo of
something uncanny, supernormal. It may be that in the stress and shock
of battle the strings--some of the strings--of the human instrument get
broken; that poor Tommy, gazing into the night of the long silence,
becomes a prey to morbid fancies, which presently are worked up into
premonitions. There may be something in this, but the men of inaction
are more prone to fancies than men on active service. Another theory
suggests that the same power within which questions, supplies an answer.
It may be so; but no one is anxious for the answer Death brings. One can
only smile at the crass stupidity of most of the explanations given by
those who deny the existence of super-natural agencies and powers. The
region of spiritual dynamics is destined to be the science of the
future.
In a somewhat sceptical age it is worth while noticing that from the
earliest dawn of history, under varying forms of government and
civilisation with which we are acquainted, the belief in premonitions
was unchallenged. The old Greeks and Latins were the keenest thinkers
the world so far has seen; yet they believed in ghosts, omens, and
premonitions. (They would smile in lofty scorn at some of the
superstitions to-day taught under the Elementary Education Act of 1870.)
Unbelief in such things super-natural, therefore, cannot be accepted as
a sign of lofty mentality. A journalistic friend was staying with me
some few months ago. We were sitting smoking rather late after dinner.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked. "Don't be so absurdly foolish!" he
cried angrily. "That's all right," I remarked quietly. "Now I know you
won't mind sleeping in our haunted room; many foolish people do object."
"Great Scott!" he ejaculated, "no haunted room for me!" Nor would he
even look at it. He would not face the logical sequence of his dogmatic
unbelief. Only a brave man dare express all he believes.
Now it is well known that every advance in scientific knowledge is
greeted with mocking laughter. We know the jeers with which even clever
men greeted the Marconi claims. It is not so many years ago that a
distinguished member of the French Academy of Science rose up amongst
his colleagues and pronounced the Edison phonograph to be nothing more
than an acoustical illusion. So we are told that soldiers' visions are
optical illusions. That is no answer. Call them optical delusions if you
like, then the query arises what causes these optical delusions, of
which we have countless instances, which inform a man of the hour, and
sometimes the manner, of his death? To call an effect by another name
does not dispose of the cause of such effect, nor is it any solution of
the mystery.
Few thinkers now, worthy of the name, seriously dispute the existence of
super-natural forces and influences. The whole system of Christianity,
of belief in all ages, is founded upon such things. To-day front-rank
men are investigating in avenues of research where once they sneered.
There is much fraud and cheap talk in ordinary life, but not under fire.
Men are not cheap then, nor are they paltry. Strange that where death is
busiest the evidence of life beyond and above it all should abound. The
invisible, full of awe, is also full of teaching, it is pregnant with
whispers. The mind, tuned up to a new tension, receives all kinds of
Marconi-like messages. What sends such whispers? Is it that in the
moment of supreme self-sacrifice and splendid devotion to duty that
spiritual perceptions are sharpened? Who shall say? "He was hit, and he
rushed forward shouting, 'Why, there's my----' then he dropped dead,
but he saw someone, of that I am sure." So spoke a man of the A.S.C.,
who saw his comrade die. Deep calls to deep, and if we put our ear to
the call we may hear the message. On the battlefield, as in no other
place, there is the call of soul to soul, of heart to heart, intensified
by all our powers of emotion, which duty calls forth at their best.
Tommy Atkins stares more fixedly into the dim future, the greater the
gloom the more he searches for the gleam, and sometimes it is vouchsafed
to him. There is no doubt that mind calls to mind. After all, time and
space are artificial things. They cannot be spiritual barriers. Why
should a mother, thinking of her lad at the front in a supreme moment of
affection and deep yearning, not be able to do what frequently happens
unconsciously among ordinary acquaintances? Often a thought will pass
from one mind to another in a moment of silence.
The uncanny under fire must take its place among things to be
investigated, the evidence is too convincing to be pooh-poohed. Science
and philosophy are now boldly entering the dim regions of the occult in
search of its laws; on the battlefield Tommy Atkins is already there
thinking over weird things and he comes to conclusions, finding the
lights by which he steers.
This chapter could not be complete without mentioning another mystery of
the battlefield: it is this--the number of instances in which the
Germans have savagely pounded a church with their artillery, only to
find on entering the ruin that the cross was still there erect and
intact. One Uhlan soldier climbed upon an altar to smash a crucifix,
slipped and put his ankle out. That may be a coincidence. Next moment a
shell killed him and one of his comrades, the crucifix remained
uninjured. Soldiers, French and British, talk of these uncanny things,
interpreting them in several ways, but each of these ways is the pathway
of the spirit--perhaps part of the altar steps on which men climb up
through the darkness to God.
II
WAR THE REVEALER
War is not only the Great Educator, it is the Great Revealer. Its
marches and bivouacs, its battles, its commonplaces and surprises, its
trials and its triumphs, are a singular school of experience. The
various impacts upon man's psychological anatomy produce strange
results. They seem like the blows of some Invisible Sculptor, producing
out of commonplace material a hero and it may be a demi-god. The opening
orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and
attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange
dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has
its theme, some song of spiritual things. His gaze is towards the sky
line and he sees strange things, a whole battery of lights each of which
is in its way a revelation. The battle chorus crying to the night of
long silence becomes a prayer, and the response is ever helpful.
The individual amid the thunder of his surroundings in the red surge of
battle somehow never allows his soul to become obscured. It is taking
impressions which later in the day as he sits by the camp fire cause
him to think and to reach conclusions which leave him a different man
from what he has been. We see this in the glow of the soldiers' letters
to those he loves: he has come within the shadow of the Divine Reality
as the wondrous book of Life and Death opens on the battlefield. The
result is the Soldier's Gospel. It would cause the devotees of little
Bethel to faint with its crude "superstitions" and absence of
meaningless and stupid dogma yet its grip of spiritual things and Divine
Aid would make the ordinary "go to meeting" Christian gape with
astonishment. The soldier's simple faith, his willing endurance, his
quiet heroisms, his silent self-sacrifice, though they call for no
louder name than duty, are just those chords which link him to the Great
Heroism which saw its culmination in Calvary. After all, deeds only are
the words of love.
The Soldier's Gospel is a wonderful revelation: the world grows
gratefully small as it appreciates its work, worth and effect upon the
man. All the lights by which he steers sum up good citizenship rather
than sectarianship. We had long ceased to cultivate the former.
"There goes a hospital ship," and a Commander of one of H.M. Patrols
pointed out to me a transport full of wounded. We thought in pity of
that array of maimed men, of silent suffering, of bandages, slings,
crutches and artificial limbs, but suddenly there arose from the
transport a mighty cheer of greeting and salutation to the white ensign.
That was the reply of war's wreckage to those who pitied. It is a
wonderful Gospel that produces this. But the invisible, while full of
awe, does not daunt him, the soldier reaches out towards the rather
unknown searching for light and finding it. Under fire means so much, it
is filled up with so many experiences, you march through a lifetime in a
few seconds, you get new views of the past years from another angle of
vision. Shadow and darkness and doubt are lifted, the soldier is frank
and honest, he is not hide-bound by petty superstitions, he is willing
fairly to consider and weigh all sensations, visions and inner
illuminations. He is not blinded with the dogma of either agnosticism or
sectarianism, while his sense of humour saves him from many of the
errors of the various "Christian" brotherhoods. Curious enough, the
people who object to duty, who are unwilling to strike a blow for
righteousness, invariably belong to some of the freak sects and are
devotees of sectarianism in its narrowest meaning.
No doubt "Vicarious Suffering" the root doctrine of many sects in this
country is responsible for the general shirking of duty on the part of
so many men to-day. Men look to the ballot box for their meat in due
season. They want all the privileges of citizenship without the
responsibilities. The sects of to-day in teaching that the historic
Christ took all our sins upon His shoulder have produced a type of
sentimental immoralist who creeps under the shelter of the Cross,
content that Christ should suffer in his place. So long as the Cross
does not offend his eyesight, he is willing to find refuge in its
shadow. Where selfishness reigns there is no vision. The gaze is upon
gain, personal comfort, things entirely earthly. A man who is always
looking at mud thinks in terms of mud. Just as a great naturalist
confesses a loss of the finer sense of music, so there is the loss of
the spiritual vision, for the spiritual sense is just as real as any
other sense, but it can become useless and drop out of our life, if we
do not value it and no longer use it. There are people with an artistic
sense. There are more without it.
The doctrine of the atonement is used to promote the crude idea that to
put our responsibilities upon others is more religious than facing them
oneself. Christ's atonement is no isolated fact in history to make men
cowards, but a sustained attitude of devotion in which every man and
woman is to take a part. Instead of thanking Christ for hanging there
upon the Cross in our place we should strive for the same courage, the
same endurance, the supreme devotion to duty and the vision of Divine
Aid will be ours perhaps in Angel form. To the brave in all ages has
come the vision of higher things.
III
THE SOUL'S BOUNDARY LINE
"I never was religious, but this business is changing me and many
thousands more," so writes a soldier. From another soldier's letter we
get, "War is the most sobering influence I know ... it sobers their
every day. They listen more attentively to the religious services.
Sometimes I wish for the sake of the morals of our army that we were
always at war."
When I was in Northern France I came in contact with many wounded French
soldiers, men who had gone to the front as atheists and returned firm
believers. "Thank the good God I have really seen. I fell wounded in
twenty-three places they tell me. I fell cursing a God I did not believe
in: then a cold hand was laid upon my brow. I looked up and saw--ah! my
God! how beautiful a Being. Now I do not want, I do not care to live for
I want to see that beautiful Being again. I know I shall. Leave me. See
to the others." This was a voluntary statement of a French soldier who
called me to his side simply to light a cigarette for him. I left him
perfectly happy and it was quite true about his number of wounds. He
lived only a few hours and he knew that he was dying. Men do not usually
tell lies on their death beds.
Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of
the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the
whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears
playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow
close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow
as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the
scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the
wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty
picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The
greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion
and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears
his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to ----." Examples
of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only
thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the
Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are
again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as
the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that
has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers
stare into the embers and forget to suck their pipes.
To explain the book of life, one would require the scrolls of eternity.
War throws light on some of its stray pages as they flutter for a second
on the wings of time and then disappear, but not before it has flung its
cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of
psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking the
subject was one for jest, but there is far more in it than jesters are
likely to discover. Mocking laughter never discovered anything except
the vacuous fool. The appearances of spiritual beings give but scant
opportunity for examination but serious investigation has now taken the
place of cheap sneering. After all religion is founded upon a philosophy
of apparitions. The vision of angels at Mons is no new thing.
Catholicism is founded on such visions and no religion worthy of the
name is without its story of angels. New aspects of matter have laid
many materialistic theories in the dust, the mysterious potencies of
matter which the latest science is revealing, the energy of electrons,
and radium are giving us a new science of super-sensual physics and with
it new vistas of thought.
It is no longer necessary to apologize for the work of psychic research,
that is among intelligent people. Light is gaining on the darkness. "I
felt another hand assisting me to steer," said a sailor man to me who
vainly tried to explain how he kept his boat from what appeared certain
destruction. He would scorn to be called a religious man. "There is
nothing of the ranter in me--you know sir," and he used uncomplimentary
remarks which I omit. "But there sir, it was no skill of mine. All I saw
was death and destruction for me and my mates, yet I knew we should pull
through all right. There was another that shipped as passenger in the
darkness."
The question of immortality and of the existence of spiritual entities
which had been relegated to the limits of illusions and dreams in
Victorian times by the fumbling amateur philosophers of that day, can
now be discussed with quiet in the old philosophic vein which
characterized the great age of thought when Greek sages argued in the
Gardens of Athens. This fact alone justifies a book of the present
character. The bumptious and dull ass who announces "Miracles do not
happen," is now seen in true perspective and he cuts a poor figure.
Apparitions, telepathy and clairvoyance are not explanations, but names
for facts demanding separate explanations. In regard to such the
"ecclesiastical damn" and the "scientific damn" have been freely used.
If men have been hypnotized by ghost stories, they certainly have been
deluded by stories of unnatural science. To deny activities of life
natural and super-natural is rather silly considering no man has solved
the life principle. The atoms forming the material of the brain may be
proved ultimately to be identical with those that compose a jelly-fish
or a jar of margarine, and brain appears to be the organ of mind, but it
is mind that grasps things, places things, and thinks. Life is concerned
with _thought_ as well as atoms. It receives thoughts from all sides,
sometimes it claims to detect the thought giver--and that is to have a
fuller vision. Men think quickly on the field of battle. They are not
constrained by a narrow education and a narrower conventionalism to
limit their thoughts to what others think in their own circle.
IV
THE SPIRITUAL ENTITY
Why is it that men in all ages, the best of men, the most gifted of men,
with the evidence of the senses so strongly against them, have believed
that a spiritual personal entity survives death's disaster? That men do
so is seen in all literature and witnessed to in all lands. Vedic hymns,
3,500 years old sing of a spiritual body with as clear a vision as S.
Paul. We are collecting the evidence that has floated down the ages and
examining it with a new criticism. The attitude of "Pooh! Bah!" of Early
Victorian times is no longer the mark of superiority. It is now, as it
was then, the mark not only of ignorance but stupid dullness. The frame
of mind which used to dismiss everything with the word "impossible" is
now recognized not as science but ignorance. The researches of a
Crookes, of a Sir Oliver Lodge, Myers, Gurney, Rochas, Gabriel Delanne,
Lombroso, in the region of the occult command serious attention.
Swedenborg communicated messages from people who had long passed to
their relatives on matters of fact which were found accurate in every
detail.
M. Rochas speaks of an externalized consciousness which feels a touch.
Within man is the plant and machinery of all kinds of faculties, one is
the perception of the spiritual. Had it been trained like his sense of
music, we should no longer be in the dark of despair over our dead. The
trend of thought to-day is to show man a spiritual being in a spiritual
universe, that death is merely transition. If not, then God is the
Cosmic Murderer. The spiritual sense of man is his faculty of response
to the spiritual world around him, just as his musical sense is his
measure of response and his reception of the world of music around him.
By some magic in the red surge of war, this spiritual response is
sharpened and quickened as every other sense is, and the soldier sees
visions. Man working within time and space is influenced by what is
beyond the one and the other, the full significance of this world would
seem to be in another scheme of things to which this is only the
vestibule. The soul's wave movements have their laws. In that soul is
some fine Marconi-like instrument which registers impressions, and from
time to time receives spiritual warnings and perceives spiritual beings.
Serious men are now boldly investigating. Little help comes from the
sectarians who seem to begrudge God his universe; everything has to be
cheapened to the worm's-eye view of little Bethel, which steeped in
politics has long lost sense of the spiritual. The old Greeks and Latins
were acute thinkers, yet they believed in spiritual beings and their
appearances. It was only in the days of cheap thinking that it required
a special valour to express belief in the super-natural. The fact is,
most people are like the devils of scripture who "believe and tremble"
without admitting the authority of their belief. It is refreshing to
find a writer like Mr. W. S. Lilley in the _Nineteenth Century_
professing his absolute belief in ghosts. To man, and it would appear to
man alone on this plane, it is given to explore the unknown and to
establish the communion of soul with soul.
After all it is a question of evidence. If a man say "I won't believe in
anything super-natural whatever the evidence may be," it is best to
leave him to his folly. If he will accept the evidence that would pass
muster in a court of law, then you have a common ground, you can weigh
evidence. To me the evidence for spiritual appearances is overwhelming
looking at it from the strictly legal angle of vision.
In years gone by the scientific genius began with the assertion that
everything must have had a beginning, and to assert that there was a
spiritual Being with no beginning was nonsense. To the dim indistinct
crowd such appeared to be clever reasoning. But our very consciousness
insists that there is something which had no beginning, and Reason adds,
"else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had
a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that
somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal,
incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the
other," which recalls the Athanasian Creed.
I cannot prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells
me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest
distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician
has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within
me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me
that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the unlimited
extension beyond.
In all ages we have the mystic. Now the mystic is common to all
religions. He is the man who has felt the touch of spiritual beings, the
call of Heavenly things, and we have to explain him. In seeking to do
this we shall realize some of the truth of the things soldiers see which
we have called "The Weird in War."
V
ANGELS
The evidence for the existence and the appearance of angels does not
rest on the testimony merely of men who fought at Mons. But even that
evidence which is accepted by the talented author of _The Bowmen_
requires some explaining away and he admits that there is a difficulty
in ignoring it. But there is the accumulating evidence of the ages. When
we have explained away the soldiers' delusions, we have to confront
those of the world's wisest sons--giants in thought. We have to confront
the fact that all great religions have the theory of angels.
After all, every good thought may be the whisper of an angel, every
beautiful prospect may be but the glint of the wing, every ray of light
and heat but the waving of the robes of those higher spiritual
intelligences which rush hither and thither on God's service, whose
faces see God in Heaven. Such a belief is just as sound, and far more
philosophical than any of the guesses I have read so far, given us as
"explanation" of such phenomena.
I am in hearty agreement with much that Mr. Arthur Machen writes in his
book _The Bowmen_. It is a book everyone should read. That splendid
story of failure and triumph, the Retreat from Mons, prompted him to
write a story on an Angelic Host coming to the aid of the British force.
He wrote it after the manner of the journalist who is an eye-witness of
the event. Many people still believe what they read in the newspapers;
and many people believed his story. But he is altogether wrong when he
imagines that he is the author of the belief in Angelic visions. I was
in France hearing stories of angelic intervention long before Mr. Machen
wrote his delightful yarn. A frog might as well imagine that his croak
is responsible for the whole world of music, as to postulate that his
story gave rise to the theory of Angels. Men had visions of such long
before the first stone of our venerable shrine at Westminster was laid,
before the Romans built their first mud huts in the valley of the Tiber,
before the Pyramids raised their terrific greatness to the heavens. So
Mr. Machen need not concern himself on that score.
The Anglican Church has failed dismally to keep before people the
teaching of the Church in regard to Angels and Angelic intervention in
the affairs of men. There I am in entire agreement with Mr. Machen.
Soldiers tell their stories of angels and a few bishops cackle; but not
one of them dares to speak of the fuller belief of the Church in angels
and the soul-inspiring mystery of the Communion of Saints, the
inter-relationship between those on the earth-plane and those who have
passed to the higher life. The hardworking priest in the slums
fearlessly proclaims this one sacrament of life with the Divine Life,
his belief in angels and their help, in saints and their prayers, and
because he believes he is able to work under conditions which make life
for a cultured man almost intolerable. But he works, thankful to be left
alone by his bishop: for war has declared a close time for ritualistic
curates. But the soldier whose patriotism he has nurtured writes home to
him telling frankly his experiences, his dreams, his visions. I have
seen many of these letters. The writers are not liars nor are they
hysterical subjects, but fine specimens of healthy manhood. Here and
there a dissenting divine has raised his voice to declare there may be
something in these stories of angels, but the dissenting pulpit is under
the despotism of the pew and cry of "Rome" is enough. "Honest doubt" is
always sure of a sympathetic audience, "honest belief" is greeted with
the cry of superstition or the cuckoo cry of "Popery."
A soldier sees something super-natural. Some one says I know a hundred
or a thousand soldiers who did not see it. A man may witness a murder.
His evidence is accepted in the law courts. They do not call the hundred
thousand people who did not see it in proof that no murder was
perpetrated. Few people know the fundamental principles of evidence.
More people misuse it.
VI
FELLOWSHIP WITH THE UNSEEN
Religion is man's fellowship with the Unseen, and it would seem that
bishops and various crank divines are determined that such a belief
shall be discouraged. Man's nature has upon it the Hall Marks of Heaven.
Woven into man's anatomical texture we find faculties that transcend
this world, that are for ever intent upon the waves that beat upon us
from another shore. He sees the coastline of another world to which he
commits his dead. We call such people Mystics, Catholics, Seers, etc.
They are the people who have had touch with the Unseen. After all, the
people with actual personal experience of spiritual power, who shape
their lives by their experience are the real assets of belief.
Man may or may not be sprung from the beast, he may or may not have been
raised from slime. Man's spirit did not arise in slime, that at all
events came from a race of flame. Dust will not account for everything.
The Church in its greatest office of all, the Communion Service, claims
to worship in union with "Angels and Archangels and with _all_ the
Company of Heaven." Having proclaimed this tremendous fact the Church,
for the most part leaves it, and bishops view any further annunciation
of the fact with suspicion and sometimes with threats.
On one solemn day in the year the Church invokes S. Michael and all
Angels. S. Michael's Mass as it is still called. The old teaching of the
Church bids us lift our eyes to behold those more intimate intelligences
which stand nearer the Great and Central Mystery. When a soldier
stumbles by chance upon one of those higher beings he is regarded as the
victim of hallucination, of superstition or drink or all of them. A
chaplain with dull German Protestantism obscuring his view of spiritual
things treats him as some unclean thing. Dissent in England for years
has been synonymous with pro-Germanism. It has been at war with the
historic creed of Christendom. It was better for their aims that angels
should not exist.
Before dull German Protestantism with its gross materialism raised the
plentiful crop of sects in England, our country was known through Europe
as "Merrie England." Our people loved the festival of S. Michael. S.
Michael's Mass was a red letter day. The Communion and Inter-Communion
of earth with heaven was emphasized. Families met that day to pray and
feast, lovers plighted their troth, gatherings of relatives and friends
was the rule, joy was the key-note. Then dissent raised its ugly head,
dissent that had its birth in Germany. These kill-joys got the upper
hand. The recognition of the Christ-Mass, Christmas and the
Michael-Mass, Michaelmas, was put down by law. Dissent has never
hesitated to use compulsion when it lay ready to hand to enforce
materialism. So belief in angels well nigh ceased to exist. To-day the
revival comes from actual experience rather than from church teaching.
The antagonism to such belief amounts to unreasonable heights of folly.
Luther has so long occupied the place of Christ that dissent has
forgotten what Christ taught us in regard to angels. We ignore the fact
that He claimed to have seen angels, and to have had their help and
ministration. When politics mix with religion, spirituality dies, there
is no vision, for there is little belief and less sincerity. No wonder
the soldier's vision of angels strikes them as something altogether
beyond the pale of belief.
It is time that our "spiritual fathers" and other stepfathers began to
give us a lead in spiritual things. We are burdened with bishops who
play to the gallery and the cheaper press, who would rather take a
confirmation service in a coal-pit than in a consecrated shrine of
prayer, for the simple reason that "Confirmation in a Coal-pit" gets a
flaming advertisement in every paper. Their vision is set on notoriety:
the spiritual vision recedes. How can they have sympathy with those who
pierce the boundary line that separates this world from a higher plane?
Men who have spent their lives on office seeking can never be seers or
priests. Parsons who beat the political drum may rise to power
political, never to the power spiritual. The vision glorious is to those
who face duty, self-sacrifice, and see in them the Divine Call, who
believe in the sacrifice of the Gospel rather than its comfort. The
charlatan must not dominate the Christian in our spiritual pastors, if
it do, then such are not qualified to minister in spiritual things.
VII
THE WHITE COMRADE
The story that angels fought on the side of the Allies in the battle of
Mons must rest upon evidence, coupled with experience. If we begin by
assuming that there can be no intelligences in the universe unless they
are clothed in the regulated fashion, then no amount of evidence will
suffice. It is a worm's-eye view that regards man as the last word in
mind.
Meanwhile France is pursuing the evidence for another story exclusively
of French origin and vouched for by men to whom the belief in spiritual
beings is repugnant, viz., the apparition of "Le Camarade Blanc," of
whom at Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons and Ypres men talked with
hushed voices but with the quiet assurance of men who had seen. It must
be something arresting which changes an atheist into a mystic. Again and
again the French wounded speak of a man in white bending over them as
they lay on the field helpless, and ministering relief. The mysterious
one whom our allies call the "Comrade in White" appears simultaneously
on different parts of the battlefield. His mission ever is one of
mercy.
_The Living Church_ reprints from _Work and Life_ an article giving a
full account of "The White Comrade," furnished by a wounded soldier. All
accounts agree in the main facts. He is generally observed after "severe
fighting," he appears where "death is busiest," he "ignores shot and
shell," he is ever "calm, collected," and brings with him an atmosphere
of peace. Men of the 87th and 128th French Infantry who have been
fighting in the Argonne, have seen him, and on several occasions he has
been seen in the trenches.
The soldier's account which appeared in _The Living Church_ is worth
reading. It is not conclusive evidence, but the number of such
experiences has value on the great subject of Spiritual Intervention.
Religion pledges itself to such a belief. This is the soldier's story,
one of many similar stories:
"It was the next day. At noon we got word to take the trenches in front
of us. They were two hundred yards away, and we weren't well started
till we knew that the big guns had failed in their work of preparation.
We had advanced 150 yards when we found it was no good. Our captain
called to us to take cover, and just then I was shot through both legs.
"I fell into a hole of some sort. I suppose I fainted, for when I opened
my eyes I was all alone. The pain was horrible, but I didn't dare to
move lest the Germans should see me, for they were only fifty yards
away, and I did not expect mercy. I was glad when the twilight came.
There were men in my own company who would run any risk in the darkness
if they thought a comrade was still alive.
"The night fell, and soon I heard a step, not stealthy, as I expected,
but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those
untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I
saw the gleam of white in the darkness I thought it was a peasant in a
white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly I guessed that it was
'The Comrade in White.'
"At that very moment the German rifles began to shoot. The bullets could
scarcely miss such a target, for he flung out his arms as though in
entreaty, and then drew them back till he stood like one of those
wayside crosses that we saw so often as we marched through France. And
he spoke. The words sounded familiar, but all I remember was the
beginning, 'If thou hadst known,' and the ending, 'but now they are hid
from thine eyes.' And then he stooped and gathered me into his arms--me,
the biggest man in the regiment--and carried me as if I had been a
child.
"I must have fainted again, for I awoke to consciousness in a little
cave by a stream, and 'The Comrade in White' was washing my wounds and
binding them up. I wanted to know what I could do for my friend to help
him or to serve him. He was looking toward the stream and his hands were
clasped in prayer; and then I saw that he, too, had been wounded. I
could see, as it were, a shot-wound in his hand, and as he prayed a drop
of blood gathered and fell to the ground. I cried out. I could not help
it, for that wound of his seemed to be a more awful thing than any that
bitter war had shown me. 'You are wounded, too,' I said. Perhaps he
heard me, perhaps it was the look on my face, but he answered gently:
'This is an old wound, but it has troubled me of late.' And then I
noticed sorrowfully that the same cruel mark was on his feet. You will
wonder that I did not know sooner. I wonder myself. But it was only when
I saw his feet that I knew him."
An incident which left a great impression upon me occurred at a hospital
in North West France in September 1914 quite early in the war. I was
visiting some wounded English and French soldiers. One poor fellow, a
Parisian, called me to his side. "Come close, monsieur, for I would talk
in a whisper. You are English--yes: and you English are common sense,
practical--tell me--do you believe in God and angels, such things as
priests teach children and women?"
"My measure of experience in life has compelled my belief in angels or
spiritual beings, and common sense demands my belief in a Supreme Mind
which I call God, the one Basic Fact," I replied.
"Monsieur I would talk with you. Do you believe that this God has
priests to reveal such things to us?"
"The Great Supreme Mind has priests, leaders, prophets, in all
departments of knowledge, music, mathematics, chemistry, navigation or
engineering--why should He not have chosen instruments to reveal
theological truth?"
He lay some time quiet, then he said, "It is good; now I feel I can tell
you, for you will not smile. For years, ever since I could think, I have
been an atheist. I went into this war an atheist. A few days ago a shell
burst near me and I was wounded in twenty-nine places." (This statement
was subsequently substantiated by the doctor and a nursing sister of
mercy.) "Monsieur, I was in great pain: then suddenly a kind face was
looking into mine, something touched my brow, the awful pain ceased.
'You called me,' a soft voice said. Then I remembered that when I was
wounded I had cried, 'Oh, my God!' and I laughed, monsieur, for I was an
atheist. Then I lost consciousness with that kind face still bending
over me. Now I lie and think of that kind face. The doctors say maybe I
shall recover, and the sisters here say to me that it is all in the Good
God's hands and I am content. I say it is all in the Good God's hands.
When that kind face was looking into mine I cried out 'I am an atheist,'
and he just smiled and said 'But you called me.'"
I offered to get a priest for the poor fellow, but he shook his head.
"No, monsieur. I have been an enemy of priests all my life--an enemy of
religion--the Church. To offer the remaining days of my wreckage to
God--no--I have but a few hours to live, and I would think of that kind
face, and when I think of it the pain ceases. Ah, monsieur, I had
wonderful arguments to show that there was no God, and that the clerics
are the people's enemies--yet when I was struck down I called 'Oh, my
God!' It is comical. That is why the kind face smiled."
Another wounded French soldier said to me: "When I go back to Toulon I
shall have something to say to my comrades. I always thought priests
were only half men, but my God! I have seen them fight. It is
magnificent. A priest led us when we hesitated, I got my two wounds
following him--a priest. Oh! it is truly unbelievable to think that I
should follow a priest. He led us to triumph. He led me to something
more. That day I knew religion was true. I saw something in his face. I
saw it again when he fell wounded, and I was wounded but I could only
think of him. Ah, life is droll--Now I go back to Toulon with two bad
wounds and a religion. Priests--I have seen them fight, and I lie and
laugh at myself and my comrades as fools for we thought of them as mere
amusements for women and children. I saw priests go forward where my
noble comrades held back--my noble comrades who sneer at priests. It is
droll."
FIVE SKETCHES
BY R. THURSTON HOPKINS
I
OMBOS
We were talking at the club about spirit manifestations, and retailing
the usual second or third-hand accounts of family spooks and deceased
aunts showing themselves to their sorrowing relatives.
"It is strange the tricks which our brains will sometimes play us," said
Barton. "I remember once seeing a ghost myself, and I can tell you that
the sensation is a very curious one. It was a good many years ago, when
I was out in Bombay in the National Indian Bank, and I had been sitting
up until the early hours trying to trace some fraudulent entries in the
bank's books by one of our clerks who had absconded with a considerable
sum of money.
"Everybody in the bank building had long since gone home or to bed,
where I ought to have been myself, so I was vastly astonished when I
looked up from the ledger to see somebody sitting at the desk where I
myself had been writing a few moments before. I felt quite upset for a
moment, until I recognised the intruder. He was nebulous, but I could
see plainly enough who it was."
"A member of your family in England?" asked Duckford, who was a firm
believer in the good old-fashioned second sight of the Scotch
Highlanders. Barton answered in his peculiarly quiet way.
"No, it was myself. The appearance of seeing an image of one's self is
not altogether unusual, I believe. But, of course, such a thing is
really all nonsense ... a matter of nerves."
"Now, I do not think it is fair of you to put all such things down to
nerves," said Captain Crabbe, who had returned wounded from France after
being in the field since the outbreak of the Great War. "If one cannot
always explain, one need not therefore ridicule." Crabbe made this
remark with a gravity that was somewhat unusual with him.
"Bless my soul, boy, you haven't been seeing the Angels of Mons or the
Agincourt Bowmen over there in Flanders, have you?" asked Duckford,
regarding Crabbe with a keen eye, and scenting something savouring of
the mysterious, the super-natural. "Do you believe in these stories? I
mean--superstitions?"
Captain Crabbe shook his head. "Not greatly," he said smiling. "But I am
not one of those who thoughtlessly laugh at that which is out of the
common, merely because it cannot be explained on ordinary grounds. Not
since I have spent nearly twelve months over in France, at any rate. Are
you interested in the weird?"
"I'd be a fool if I wasn't," said Duckford, selecting a cigar from his
case. "What's your story about--I see you have one to tell. I am not
inquisitive as a rule; but, somehow your manner has warned me that you
have something singularly interesting to tell."
Crabbe remained silent a short time. Then, looking at Duckford very
earnestly, he answered:
"Well, perhaps I may tell you my story, though I would not tell it to
all these heretics around me. Indeed, only two or three other people
have ever heard it. I hate--ah! more than I can convey to any living
soul--even to think about it. But to you it may be of special interest."
"You know that I look upon all such things from the point of a simple,
unbiassed inquirer," returned Duckford. "Come along, Crabbe."
"A good cigar in front of the card room fire, and your story, eh?"
Duckford led the way up to the snug card room where a cheerful fire was
blazing. "Sit down. Where is that dashed waiter? Oh, you there, Griggs.
Come along with some whisky and soda."
Crabbe sat down in a deep chair by the fire, and stretched his feet to
the flame. Duckford said nothing; only pulled at his cigar and
patiently waited for what he knew was soon coming.
"Do you know--but, no, of course you don't," he began presently. "But
can you imagine how it can be that a man could pass all his force into a
bronze statue and make it live.... You've heard these literary men and
artists talk about putting their souls into their work, Duckford?"
Duckford pursed his lips. "Everything lives--even a bronze statue," he
said seriously. "If it was not so it would atrophy, it would crumble and
disappear. Look at the case of----"
"That's just what old Ombos said. And if he didn't understand all about
those things, I should jolly well like to be led to the man who did.
Ombos told me hundreds of times that a man walked about this earth
throwing his force into everything he came in contact with--scattering
some kind of power; and of course that power is picked up by stones and
houses and ... statues, or anything. Ombos misused it; that was
disastrous. It seems to me that it is safe to use this god-energy only
in its own proper sphere. You have very likely heard of men who have
tried to pass themselves into inanimate objects? Well, what would you
say if I tell you that _I_ even _I_--who sit now so soberly before you,
whom before the war you knew to be ordinarily, a quiet,
peaceably-disposed, sport-loving English fellow--had once been under
the spell of a bronze statue that somebody had passed clean into?"
"You were under the hypnotic influence of your friend Ombos, probably,"
I suggested.
"You may think so, _now_; but you just wait till I have told you all
about Ombos, and the bronze statue. Then you'll be able to decide if it
was trickery.... It would be different if you could have seen the
statue."
Then Crabbe proceeded to unfold his strange tale.
"You know that when the war first broke out I was attached to the
Loamshires, and we were one of the first British Regiments to start for
the land across the water. After six months' fighting, during which
every day was crowded with enough incident to provide a three-reel
thriller for a cinema-man, I found myself quartered at Ypres. Have you
ever been to Ypres? If you have, it will act as a kind of antidote to
those wretched picture post-cards which show it in its last phase--a
heap of senseless wreckage. The 'Coal Boxes,' 'Jack Johnsons' and other
varied presents from Krupp's had not fallen on the town with such
lavishness at the time my regiment found shelter there. It was a June
afternoon when I first found my way there. A mellow drowsiness hung over
the Cloth Hall and Cathedral. It was indeed a very pleasant little town.
The old houses of the square, the Prior's Gate, the noble trees, the
stretch of green turf, all shared in the dream-like repose. In the Rue
Bar-le-Duc, as everybody knows, just where it winds around to the fine
gateway of the Cathedral, there is a row of little shops with bulging
leaded windows, dusty and delightful. The one that took my eye was an
antique shop. I had a whole regiment of aunts and uncles at home who in
every letter demanded souvenirs, and here was the chance to lodge a
shipping order, with about a hundred labels, and leave the old
antiquarian fogey to send 'em off. It was inside that I met Ombos for
the first time. I selected the souvenirs, and wrote labels; but old
Ombos made a devil of a muddle over sending them off, and a very prim
maiden aunt received a snuff box adorned with a young French lady in
very scanty attire.... By the way, you don't know my aunt Sylvia, do
you?"
Crabbe laughed heartily for the first time that evening.
"I spent some hours in the bulging window of that old shop examining the
wonderful collection of beautiful old things, and staggering about on
piles of andirons and copper warming pans, old Ombos watching me all the
time with an amused smile.
"I can still see Ombos standing like a figure carved in old ivory, with
one skinny yellow hand resting on the edge of a black oak table.
"'I call all this stuff here rubbish; not worth looking at. But people
do not understand real good stuff if I show it to 'em,' he said, and
smiled a remotely contemptuous smile. 'Now if you really want to see
some choice antiques ...'
"He motioned me to follow, and taking a lighted taper, led the way into
a room at the back of his shop. Ombos pottered about with the taper on
the end of a rod; suddenly a big overhead chandelier burst into light
and I stood blinking in amazement.