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There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo sapiens? Homo idioticus!
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Land of Mist
Arthur Conan-Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, became increasingly depressed following the death of his wife, Louisa, in 1906 and the wounding of his son, Kingsley, at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. After Kingsley died of his wounds in 1918, along with Doyle’s younger brother, Innes, followed by two brothers-in-law and two nephews, he became a believer in psychic phenomena, including fairies, and an aggressive proselytizer. He even wrote a novel in which his alter ego, the irascible but highly rational Professor Challenger, was converted to a belief in the spirit world.
In that novel, The Land of Mist, written in 1925, Mr. Miromar, a medium from the unglamorous London suburb of Dalston, receives a message from the Central Intelligence of the universe. It chides mankind for refusing to accept spiritualism, an error for which, he explains, the deaths of the Great War were intended as punishment.
Evidence was sent—evidence which made the life after death as clear as the sun in the heavens. It was laughed at by scientists, condemned by the churches, became the butt of the newspapers, and was discarded with contempt. That was the last and greatest blunder of humanity. . . .
The thing was now hopeless. It had got beyond all control. Therefore something sterner was needed since Heaven’s gift had been disregarded. The blow fell. Ten million young men were laid dead upon the ground. Twice as many were mutilated. That was God’s first warning to mankind.
Further skepticism, warns Miromar, will lead inexorably to the Second Coming.
Europe was not so rational that such ideas would be dismissed with a smirk. Particularly in Catholic cultures like that of France, the church still had influence. Both British Tommies and French poilus, mostly uneducated, many of them farmers, were ready to entertain the possibility of divine intervention. God was, after all, On Their Side. That the Germans also insisted Gott mit uns didn’t trouble them.
From the first battles of the war, tales circulated in France of interventions by Saint Geneviève, the holy guardian of Paris, and acolyte of its patron saint, Saint Denis. In September 1914, Father Sauvêtre, pastor of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on the site of Montagne–Ste-Geneviève, at the edge of Paris’s Latin Quarter, published a booklet, Saint Geneviève and the German Invasion, which explained that it wasn’t Joffre or Gallieni who saved Paris, but the saint herself.
At almost the same moment, British troops spoke of mysterious manifestations. On August 26, as the Germans poured in through Belgium and overwhelmed the town of Mons, General Horace Smith-Dorrien ordered the forty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force to defend it as best they could. The effort, finally unsuccessful, cost 7,812 killed, wounded, and missing. The survivors fell back on Le Cateau in a withdrawal that didn’t stop until the BEF combined with the French to counterattack Von Kluck’s forces at the Battle of the Marne.
During the days and nights they retreated down endless country roads, exhausted, sleepless, and terrified, British soldiers reported visions. “I had the most amazing hallucinations marching at night,” said one young officer, “so I was fast asleep, I think. Everyone was reeling about the road and seeing things. I saw all sorts of things; enormous men walking toward me, and lights and chairs, and things in the road.”
Angels on the battlefield
On September 5, Brigadier General John Charteris, the chief intelligence officer, reported that accounts of one vision, the Angel of Mons, were spreading through the ranks. It told “of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress.” Some men claimed the angel was Joan of Arc, though for her to have intervened on the side of the English, who had burned her at the stake, would have shown truly saintly forbearance.
Tales also circulated of ghostly archers sending clouds of arrows into the German ranks, as phantom bowmen were supposed to have helped win the day for Henry V at Agincourt in 1415. This urban legend at least was easily traced to its source. Welsh author Arthur Machen read of Mons in the Sunday papers. “It was a tale to make the heart sink, almost to deep despair. It told of the British army in full retreat, nay, in headlong, desperate retreat, on Paris. The correspondent rather pictured an army broken to fragments scattered abroad in confusion. It was hardly an army anymore; it was a mob of shattered men.” The image inspired him. On September 29, the London Evening News published his short story “The Bowman.” During a fierce rearguard action, a British soldier recalls seeing the figure of Saint George on the plates in a London restaurant and the motto Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius: May Saint George Help the English. As he visualizes the design, he sees a “long line of shapes that resemble archers [who] let fly a cloud of arrows at the advancing Germans, who fall dead in their thousands.”
French troops, their imaginations lubricated with pinard and tafia, were just as ready to credit the deity for their victory on the Marne. They spoke of finding dead Germans without visible wounds. Had they been scared to death by some terrifying vision? Others speculated about secret weapons. Lights had been reported in the sky over Paris, and thumps and bangs underground. The lights were traced to restaurants in Montmartre that ignored the blackout and neglected to turn off their advertising signs, while the subterranean noises came from cellar bakehouses where bakers thumped and pounded bread dough, the adulturants added to flour at government order having made it tougher to knead.
Unconvinced, poilus talked of Jules Verne-ian gadgets such as an invisible aircraft, the ancestor of today’s drones, that could hover above the clouds and send down bolts of electricity to fry the enemy. Before the war, chemist Eugène Turpin, a friend of Verne and inspiration for at least one of his eccentric scientist characters, patented an improved explosive based on picric acid. Who was to know he didn’t also develop a super shell that killed by displacement of air alone? He hadn’t, and the troops learned in time that proximity to a conventional blast could be just as fatal. In April 1917, poet Edward Thomas survived the Battle of Arras, but stood up to light his pipe just as one of the last shells landed nearby. A second later he fell dead, but without a scratch.
The most resourceful wartime use of psychic phenomena took place not in Paris but in Turkey. Rather than waste troops as guards, the Turks trucked their prisoners hundreds of miles into the mountains, where an old farm in Yozgat Province became a prison camp. It required only a handful of guards. Any escapee would simply wander in the wilderness until he died of starvation and exposure.
Welshman Elias Jones and Australian C. W. Hill conceived an audacious plan. In nightly séances using a Ouija board and the type of verbal codes employed by vaudeville mind readers, they convinced, first their fellow prisoners, then the officers of the garrison that they could communicate with the spirit world. They told the commandant that the ghost of the farm’s former owner, an Armenian killed by the Turks, had mentioned buried gold. Its location would be revealed only when the commandant had prayed for forgiveness at the grave of the murdered man. Jones and Hill intended to photograph the commandant as he did so, using a homemade camera. They would then blackmail him with the photos into setting them free. Wisely, they abandoned this crackpot scheme and simply mimed possession by evil spirits. It got them into hospital in Constantinople, from where they escaped or were released—ironically just a few weeks before the end of the war.
Jones and Hill were right to exploit the prevailing sense of madness. The war inspired a new belief that gods might intervene in the affairs of men: the Second Coming threatened in The Land of Mist. Those poets who survived the war were transformed by it. They no longer doubted the potency of the unseen. It perched on their shoulder, gibbering, sinking its claws into their flesh.
Robert Graves, in particular, turned away from the modern to embrace the muse of poetry, the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death. He related her to the deities of pagan mythology, and to the sybils, those psychics of the ancient world—prepubescent girls who, at Delphi, high above the Gulf of Corinth, perched on tripod seats over runnels of trickling water and, dazed by drug smoke and hormones, dispensed ambiguous advice to the emperors and satraps who abased themselves before them. Graves saw their era returning. “All a poet can do today is warn,” wrote Wilfred Owen. Taking up the challenge, Graves used the poem “On Portents” to toll the alarm bell of dreadful times to come.
If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.