War and the Weird

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Punctuation has been normalised. Dialect spellings have been retained. 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,…