Summer 2013
Page 6
Canadian soldiers embraced the ‘supernatural, uncanny and ghostly’ on the front lines, historian says
One of Canada’s top military historians has published the first serious study of the First World War’s eeriest phenomena: frontline soldiers’ accounts of ghosts and other “supernatural experiences” amid the bloody battles of Europe almost a century ago. Author Tim Cook, the Canadian War Museum’s leading expert on the 1914-18 conflict, has unearthed a host of poignant stories involving bizarre apparitions, life-saving premonitions and other unexplained happenings that shed fresh light on “the unending mental and physical strain of fighting on the edge of No Man’s Land.” Writing in the Journal of Military History, the field’s most prestigious scholarly publication, Cook describes how the knife-edge existence of Canada’s troops in battles such as Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge led some men to believe they’d seen dead comrades resurrected and wandering the scarred landscapes of the Western Front. “Grimy, exhausted soldiers, covered in mud, or asleep on a fire step could easily be mistaken for the dead,” Cook observes. “It was not lost on the soldiers that they seemed to be digging extended graves - the trenches - to protect themselves from deathdealing artillery shells. And, in sick irony, the artillery bombardments often buried the living and disgorged the dead.” One well-known story from the war is highlighted in Cook’s study: Cpl Will Bird’s moving description of the night his brother’s “ghost” saved him from certain death. Bird, who had a postwar career as a journalist and published his war memoirs under the title Ghosts Have Warm Hands, had written about a night after the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge when he was suddenly stirred from deep slumber under a tarp he’d been sharing with two fellow soldiers near the front line. “Before dawn, warm hands shook him,” Cook recounts. “Wiping away sleep, he looked with amazement at his brother Steve,” who had been reported missing in action in 1915. “Steve led him through some ruins, when he suddenly rounded a corner and disappeared.” Cpl Bird, settled for sleep in the new location, dismissed his brother’s ghostly appearance as a “hallucination.” But in the morning, he was stunned to learn that the two other soldiers under the tarp had suffered a “direct hit from a high explosive shell” and were “dismembered beyond all recognition.” Another Canadian soldier wrote to his mother that, “One night while carrying bombs, I had occasion to take cover when about twenty yards off I saw you looking towards me as plain as life.” Dumbstruck, he “crawled nearly to the place where your vision appeared” as a German shell slammed into the place he had just left behind. “Had it not been for you, I certainly would have been reported ‘missing,’” the soldier wrote. “You’ll turn up again, won’t you, mother