Detail "Menin Gate at Midnight by Longstaff (photo Maria Jintes) |
In the fall of
1916, a soldier from the Western Front returned to England on leave and
recounted an unsettling experience:
Towards the end of September, I stayed in
Kent with a recently wounded First Battalion friend. An elder brother had
been killed in the Dardanelles, and their mother kept the bedroom exactly
as he had left it, with the sheets aired, the linen always freshly
laundered, flowers and cigarettes by the bedside. She went around with a
vague, bright religious look on her face. The first night I spent there, my
friend and I sat up talking about the war until past twelve o’clock. His mother
had gone to bed early, after urging us not to get too tired. The talk had
excited me, and though I managed to fall asleep an hour later, I was
continually awakened by sudden rapping noises, which I tried to disregard but
which grew louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. Soon
sleep left me and I lay in a cold sweat. At nearly three o’clock, I heard
a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me
flying to the door. In the passage I collided with the mother who, to my
surprise, was fully dressed. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘One of the maids
had hysterics. I’m so sorry you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to
bed, but could not sleep again, though the noises had stopped. In the
morning I told my friend: ‘I’m leaving this place. It’s worse than
France.’ There were thousands of mothers like her, getting in touch
with their dead sons by various spiritualistic means.[i]
The First World
War saw a dramatic surge in spiritualism, and in their desperate wish to
communicate with the dead, many of the grieving turned to Ouija boards, mediums, and séances.[ii] It’s no surprise then that many poems of the
First World War are also peopled with ghosts.
HALLOW-E'EN,
1915
Will you come
back to us, men of our hearts, tonight
In the misty
close of the brief October day?
Will you leave
the alien graves where you sleep and steal away
To see the
gables and eaves of home grow dark in the evening light?
"O men of
the manor and moated hall and farm,
Come back
to-night, treading softly over the grass;
The dew of the
autumn dusk will not betray where you pass;
The watchful dog
may stir in his sleep but he'll raise no hoarse alarm.
Then you will
stand, not strangers, but wishful to look
And the fire-lit
casement where one, having wept you sore,
Sits dreaming
alone with her sorrow, not heeding her open book.
Forgotten awhile
the weary trenches, the dome
Of pitiless
Eastern sky, in this quiet hour
When no sound
breaks the hush but the chimes from the old church tower,
And the river's
song at the weir, -- ah! then we will welcome you home.
You will come
back to us just as the robin sings
Nunc Dimittis
from the larch to a sun late set
In purple
woodlands; when caught like silver fish in a net
The stars gleam
out through the orchard boughs and the church owl flaps his wings.
We have no fear
of you, silent shadows, who tread
The
leaf-bestrewn paths, the dew-wet lawns. Draw near
To the glowing
fire, the empty chair, we shall not fear,
Being but ghosts
for the lack of you, ghosts of our well-beloved dead.
--Winifred M Letts
In Letts’ poem, the
silent shadows of the men who have died appear not as frightening ghosts, nor as
strangers, but as “men of our hearts” who have returned to the places they have
loved. The quiet spirits who come “treading softly” are tenderly welcomed. They are urged to come out of the darkness and
into the “kindly lamplight” of home where they may find shelter and solace
under familiar gables and eaves. The beloved
ghosts are invited once again to occupy “the empty chair,” and draw near “the
glowing fire.”
The poem discloses the deep bond of kinship between the souls of the war dead and those who, “dreaming alone with…sorrow,” grieve for them at home. All have been transformed into ghosts, and all are united in the empty, lost futures that
stretch before them. With sad confidence,
the voice of the poem can say, “We have no fear of you” – for the horror is to
be found in the war, not in its dead.
#WeAreHere, photo by Rachel Dacre |
On July 1, 2016, groups of men dressed as First World War soldiers walked the streets and sidewalks of Great Britain in silence. Appearing in shopping malls, train stations, and parks, the “ghost soldiers” were largely silent except for occasionally joining together to sing the trench song “We’re Here Because We’re Here.” The commemorative tribute was inspired “in part from tales told during and after the First World War by people who believed they had seen the ghosts of loved ones they had lost.”[iii]
[ii]
To learn more about Spiritualism during the war, see “’A solace to a tortured
world…’—The Growing Interest in Spiritualism during and after WW1”
by Suzie Grogan, published online at World
War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings.
[iii]
“Secrets behind #WeAreHere revealed” by Ann Gripper, Rod McPhee, and Nicola
Oakley. The Mirror, 1 July 2016.
My grandmother "saw" her husband walk into the kitchen in Streatham in 1919. Spiritualism - sincere, heartfelt, hallucinatory and fraudulent - flourished.
ReplyDeleteJosie, I love your description of spiritualism as "sincere, heartfelt, hallucinatory and fraudulent." And as another great writer has said, ""There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." ;)
ReplyDeleteThose wretched WW1 "spirit people" - more than are dreamt of in your philosophy - lingered around to make my teenage years a misery. https://www.josieholford.com/spirit-people/
DeleteMy great uncle was wounded at Vimy Ridge in April 1917 and the family legend has it that he appeared at his mother's bedside saying 'don't worry mother, it's only my arm' two days before the telegram saying that he was wounded in the elbow and on his way home. Also the French film, J'accuse is very powerful, showing ghosts returning to their village to find themselves shut out. The ghosts were played by poilus on leave, many of whom died in the next battle, before the film was even shown. It is really quite disturbing and poignant.
ReplyDelete