Part 1 (1/2)
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 foolis.h.!.+” 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 citizens.h.i.+p rather than sectarians.h.i.+p. We had long ceased to cultivate the former.
”There goes a hospital s.h.i.+p,” 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 s.h.i.+rking 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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.