War and the Weird Part 1

War and the Weird.

by Forbes Phillips and R. Thurston Hopkins.

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 p.r.o.ne 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 cra.s.s 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 superst.i.tions 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "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 p.r.o.nounced 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. .h.i.t, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 G.o.d.

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-G.o.d. The opening orchestra of shot and sh.e.l.l 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 "superst.i.tions" 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 superst.i.tions, 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d I have really seen. I fell wounded in twenty-three places they tell me. I fell cursing a G.o.d I did not believe in: then a cold hand was laid upon my brow. I looked up and saw--ah! my G.o.d! 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sisting 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 pa.s.senger in the darkness."

The question of immortality and of the existence of spiritual ent.i.ties 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 b.u.mptious and dull a.s.s 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 d.a.m.n" and the "scientific d.a.m.n" 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 ENt.i.tY

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 ent.i.ty 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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.