Patrick Bernauw

True ghost stories of the great war

April 6, 2009 |  4 comments
Image Credit: Alfred Pearse The Angels of Mons, created by Arthur Machen - In september 1914 the famous fantasy and horror writer Arthur Machen published his story The Bowmen in a British newspaper, but he made it look like a true account of an eye witness. The story told how during the retreat from Mons (Belgium) in august 1914, some English soldiers saw advancing Germans dropping down by whole regiments, due to the fact that one of them said, half in a joke: 'May Saint George be a present help to the English!' – And see… Saint George came along and he brought with him the ghosts of the bowmen who were in the battle of Agincourt, in 1415. The Germans were pierced by their ghostly arrows.

For the next few months, nothing particular happened. But some time in 1915 it was pointed out that people were taking the story as true. Then they began to turn the bowmen into angels, and they elaborated the story and changed it in all sort of ways.

Private Robert Cleaver, for instance, declared under oath that he personally was at Mons and saw 'the Vision of the Angels' with his own eyes. He was together with some other soldiers in retreat and lying down behind small tufts of grass for cover. Suddenly the vision came between him and the German cavalry. Het described it as a 'flash'. The cavalry horses rushed in all directions and were disorganised, and the charge frittered away.

Two officers reported to the press that 'a ring of angels' appeared round a contingent of Germans. The apparition caused the Germans' horses to become unmanageable.

A mister Rawson, who was al well-known authority on occult phenomena, stated that the apparition could have been caused through one of the English being a very religious man: 'If it was his particular form of belief that angels would surround a man, then this thought could sufficiently intensify the matter to enable another man who was psyhic to see the apparition. That person might not know he was psychic, but, seeing the ring, he would state the fact aloud. The thoughts of those around would intensify the form, and all present would see them. The horses would see it easily, because animals are more psychic than human beings. That is to say, they can see finer forms of matter than the ordinary human being can possibly see.'

Full story of The Angels of Mons here

The Ghostly Cavalry
At last, in that grey winter of 1918, the guns in France and Flanders fell silent and an eerie stillness dwelt on the battlefields where the dead lay unburied in sodden trenches... Together with Corporal Barr, James Wentworth Day – who would later become a famous writer and broadcaster – went picking up post and rations. They started back to the camp at about three-thirty. It was far from dark. On his right, Wentworth Day saw a fantastic wood of larch and birch, with thin trees, torn and twisted into grotesque shapes by shell blast: ‘It was a Hans Andersen wood of Arthur Rackham trees through whose sun-reddened trunks we could see cloud-masses lit with a Cuyp-like glow.’

Suddenly, as they splashed through the sunset pools of that deserted road, German cavalry swept out of that ‘spectral wood’. A dozen or more German Uhlans ‘in those queer high-topped hats which they had worn in the dead days of 1914’ charged and up the slope to meet them, Wentworth Day saw some French dragoons in their brass cuirasses, sabres upswung, plumes dancing from their helmets. They also charged to meet the Germans with their slender lances... but then the vision passed and there was no clash of mounted men, only the empty land and a thin wood of silver in the setting sun.‘Did you see anything?’ Wentworth Day glanced at Corporal Barr, who looked white and uneasy.

‘Aye... something mighty queer,’ the Corporal said.

They reached camp, oddly shy of talking too much. The next day, at Neuve Eglise, ‘that skeleton of a village on the spine of the Ravelsberg’, Wentworth Day asked a peasant about the wood.

‘Ah! M'sieu, that wood is a very sad wood, you know! It is on the frontier... a wood of dead men! In the wars of Napoleon, in the war of 1870, in this Great War... the cavalry of France and Germany have always met each other by that wood...’
And the man showed Wentworth Day the graves of the cavalry of all these wars in the tiny churchyard...

More Phantoms of the Great War here

The Spectres of Crécy
A Colonel Shepheard, who was a staff colonel during the First World War, told Wentworth Day another strange story.
He was travelling in a car from Hazebrouck to Wimereux, together with a French captain as interpreter and aide. They dined and slept at Wimereux and the colonel dreamed he was riding the same road again, in the same car and trough the same villages. But this time, the car slowed down and stopped in one of these villages. And there, out of the earth on each side of the road, rose up the hooded, cloaked figures of silent men, thousands of them, and every man was staring fixedly at him - sadly, pitifully, endlessly... Their cloaks were grey, almost luminous, with a fine, silvery bloom on them like moths' wings. When he touched one, it came off on his fingers in a soft dust..

Slowly, they all sank back into the ground... The next morning at breakfast, Colonel Shepheard told his French aide of his dream. The officer listened to him without saying a word.

‘You know the name of that village near where your car stopped?’ the French officer asked him when he finished his story.
Colonel Shepheard described him the village he had seen twice: once in reality, once in his dream. And the French officer nodded: ‘Sure... It was Crécy indeed!... You have seen in your dream the archers who died on Crécy field in 1346, sir!’

Copyright by Patrick Bernauw, A Haunted World Tour Comments (4)

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