And We Go On (5 page)

Will Bird had no contact with men of letters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or with scientists like T.G. Hamilton or Sir Oliver Lodge. His occult experience, unlike theirs, was a product of uncanny events on the battlefield, of unsought and unmediated exposure to the paranormal. But he was not alone in his experience of supernatural phenomena: “The sense of the uncanny, of the overdetermined nature of survival in combat can be found in many memoirs and letters written by serving men” (Winter 65). What Bird shared with scientific researchers, imaginative writers, and soldiers alike was a secular, rather than a religious, view of occult phenomena. While he would continue for the rest of his life, with his wife Ethel (née Sutton), to attend the Methodist Church in which he was raised, his daughter Betty insists that, “Religion did not play a major role in his life.” Nor did he dabble in the spiritualist movement after the war; his outlook was phenomenological to the extent that it was directly based on his experience of battle.

Among the occult events he and other soldiers experienced were the startling admissions of those “not visibly in immediate danger” who had “premonitions of death.” Much like Bird's story of Christensen's premonition, Winter tells of a certain “Captain V., who approached a chaplain, said his time had come, turned to walk in a safe area, but was mistakenly shot by a sentry” (66). As far as I know, Winter had not read
And We Go On
, but his conclusion is significant for readers of Bird's work: “It is evident that soldiers' tales were important in deepening popular spiritualism, in that they added the prestige of the soldier and the weight of his experience to those who lived within or on the fringes of the spiritualist community” (67). Bird's memoir served to reinforce the findings of researchers like Dr. T.G. Hamilton, while the work of scientists helped to “normalize” the phenomenology of occult experience in war.

At the same time, Bird's narrative of paranormal events conforms to another social model where, in a masculine world of men at war, the role of women was to be mediums between the living and the dead. As Winter explains, women had long occupied a central position “in the spiritualist community. It is, therefore, not surprising that spiritualists were advocates of feminism and that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly anathematized the movement and especially the women within it” (55). In
And We Go On
, after Steve's ghost appears to announce that he has died, Will feels an uncanny compulsion to stop and spend the night in an English village
before going to the Front. In a scene that would not be out of place in a Dickens novel, he stands “by the ruins of an old water mill” where he suddenly feels “a strange chill [blow] towards me as if an unseen door had opened” (12). An English girl, Phyllis, who appears “like a phantom” is “very warm and real,” but Will begins to feel a chill run down his spine as she stops speaking to listen to someone he can't hear, then tells him she is comparing his voice to Steve's. “We talked long there together and when we parted she told me that Steve had told her that I would come. I believed her” (12). Later, on his one and only leave to England, he learns from her grieving father that Phyllis had died in London on a bombing raid by German Zeppelins: “He invited me to take dinner with him – and he called me ‘Steve.' The word shocked me. ‘I'm not Steve,' I said, sharply. ‘I'm his brother.' He peered at me, and I could see that he could not grasp what I said. ‘Steve – that's the name,' he muttered. ‘She went to meet Steve – her said it'” (98).

On the battlefield, Bird has more direct encounters with the marvellous, to an extent that even Tommy confides at war's end, “I steered clear of you. Did you ever stop to think about all the fellows who've been killed alongside you? Every time it's the other chap who gets it. I've thought about it and this time I wasn't taking any chances” (219). No other memoirist I have read recounts anything like the number and duration of Bird's uncanny experiences. Sassoon, who in
The Diaries
speaks of apparitions who come to accuse him while he convalesces in a London hospital, writes how, “when the lights are out, and the ward is half shadow and half flowing firelight, and the white beds are quiet with drowsy figures, huddled out-stretched, then the horrors come creeping across the floor: the floor is littered with parcels of dead flesh and bones, faces glaring at the ceiling, faces turned to the floor, hands clutching neck or belly; a livid grinning face with bristly moustache peers at me over the edge of my bed, the hands clutching my sheets. Yet I found no bloodstains there this morning” (161).

Sassoon has to admit that, “They are not here to scare me; they look at me reproachfully, because I am so lucky, with my safe wound, and the warm kindly immunity of the hospital is what they longed for when they shivered and waited for the attack to begin, or the brutal bombardment to cease” (162). Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, his ghosts come to accuse, like manifestations of Sassoon's own guilty conscience. Conversely, Harold
Owen, an officer serving at war's end aboard the British naval vessel
Astrea
off the coast of Africa, wrote of the vision he had had of his brother Wilfred: “He was in uniform, and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty.” From this visitation, Harold “knew with absolutely certainty that Wilfred was dead” (
Journey from Obscurity
vol. 3:198–9).

While Sassoon's ghosts come to accuse, and Owen's to inform, the ghost of Bird's dead brother displays himself far more purposefully, as if he were a battlefield scout on active duty. The first time Steve appears in the Vimy sector, Bird writes:

I was wakened by a tug at my arm. I looked up quickly, throwing back my ground sheet, and there stood Steve!

I could see him plainly, see the mud on his puttees and knees. He jerked a thumb towards the ruined houses and motioned for me to go to them. I did not speak. I thought that if I could do exactly as he said, and not wake the others, perhaps he would actually speak to me. He started to walk away as I gathered up my equipment and rifle and greatcoat, and when I hurried he simply faded from view …

In the morning I heard fellows talking about a big shell that had killed two men. I jumped up and looked. They were digging from the shelter I had left the mangled bodies of the two lads who had invited me to join them. The shell had exploded just above their heads. (48)

On another occasion, waiting for an enemy patrol at Parvillers to “reappear I felt a light tap on the shoulder. I wheeled instantly. No one was there! ‘Come,' I shouted, and jumped into the trench. Doggy [an enlisted man under his command] thought I had seen something and dived after me. As he did a Maxim opened fire from somewhere ahead and clipped weeds like a scythe in the very place where we had been crouched” (159).

Typically, Steve's warnings work on a functional level to mirror Bird's role as a guide on night patrol or as a scout to attacking units. In consequence, Bird admits that

It was not physical courage that carried me, far from it, but a state of mind that words will never describe. Each night when I slept I dreamt
of Steve, saw him clearly, and when awake, in the trenches at night, out on listening posts,
FELT
him near. In some indefinable way I depended on him. Ever since he had guided me in from that foggy unknown stretch at the back of Vimy I would go anywhere in no man's land. I knew with a – fanatical, if you like – faith, that a similar touch would lead me straight where I should go … I was always watching for him, waiting for him, trying to sense him near me. (67)

Bird's “faith” has nothing to do with conventional religion; it is more like the conditioned response of a behaviourist experiment, reinforced by results. It may best be described as a secular version of the religious imagination, where “faith” in his spirit guide lifts him out of the terror of the trenches. It is finally what gives Bird an enduring faith in life that is quite rare in Great War writing. Aboard the ship carrying the remnants of the Black Watch back to Canada, he recalls how, “Many and many a night when relaxed on outpost duty I had turned on my back for the moment and rested my eyes on the great star-lit spaces overhead until I felt lifted away from all the foul and cruel existence that we knew. Stars in the sky, twinkling stars! What a sense of the infinite they endow! It came to me as I watched them that even the war, the greatest catastrophe this world knew, was but a momentary episode, that Time and Space were limitless. And we go on. Where?” (229).

Ultimately, it is on this level of significance that Bird's title has its greatest reach. In the pre-dawn light, he stands shoulder to shoulder with “the brotherhood” of silent men waiting at the ship's railing to see the first lights of home, and realizes that, “We were prisoners, prisoners who could never escape. I had been trying to imagine how I would express my feelings when I got home, and now I knew I never could, none of us could. We could no more make ourselves articulate than could those who would not return; we were in a world apart, prisoners, in chains that would never loosen till death freed us” (231). And yet the small miracle of this book is that, at the limit of its own vanishing point, it finds the words that permit Bird and the rest of “the brotherhood” to speak the unspeakable to loved ones and to us, who know the things we have come to know because of the enduring eloquence of this remarkable Great War memoir,
And We Go On.

AND WE GO ON

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”

Wellington

Preface

In the trenches one night near Vimy Ridge I heard a newcomer ask our veteran sergeant, “Where is the war – what is it?”

The sergeant led his questioner to a firestep, and pointed over the parapet. Some yards in front, half hidden by the grass and weeds, was a skeleton, with the uniform rotted until it was indefinite. No one could say whether the shrivelled corpse were friend or foe. “That,” he said, “is war.”

The newcomer, a mere youth, looked startled. He stepped down hastily to the trench floor, swallowed hard, then asked. “How long have you been out here?”

“Sixteen months,” said the sergeant.

The youth smiled and flung back his shoulders. Sixteen months! “Then,” he said, “I guess I don't need to worry yet. We've all got the same chances, haven't we?”

It was quiet, one of those strange lulls in the shelling. The sergeant stood there in the gloom, looking into no man's land, and recited softly.

The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all –
HE
knows –
HE
knows!

The youth looked up at him. “I don't know anything about poetry,” he said, “but I had a queer feeling all the time we were marching up here. It seemed as if I was going to bump into something before I saw it …”

Ping!

We buried him before it was light. The chance bullet had come from some distant point, skimming the bags, missing the wire and the burly sergeant, and dropping, with the trajectory of a spent missile, just enough to strike the temple of the boy who had been two hours in the line. And as we went to our dugout after stand-down the old sergeant repeated more of his favourite poem.

And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master Knot of Human Fate.

This story is an effort to reveal a side of the war that has not been given much attention, the psychic effect it had on its participants. There existed before all battles and even in the calms of the trench routine, a condition before which all natural explanations failed, and no supernatural explanations were established.

Every human emotion ran its full gamut in that land of topsy turvy, and prolonged tensity of feeling wrought strange psychological changes which warped the soul itself. Never on earth was there a like place where a man's support, often his sole support, was his faith in some mighty Power. All intervening thoughts were swept aside. Unconsciously there were born faiths that carried men through critical moments, and tortured minds grasped fantasies that served in place of more solid creeds. The trench at zero hour was a crucible that dissolved all insincerity and the superficial, and it did more. It drew from even dulled and uncouth natures a perception that was attributed to the mystic and supernal.

Men glimpsed, or thought they glimpsed, that grim crossroads we all must pass. It was as if for them a voice had spoken, a hand beckoned them on. And at once there fell from them all frenzy and confusion. White-faced, unsmiling, filled with a strange courage, they greeted that which waited them. Was it all phenomena produced by war-strained imaginations?

I have another reason for writing. We are being deluged now, a decade after the war, by books that are putrid with so-called “realism.” They portray the soldier as a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor. Vulgar language and indelicacy of incident are often their substitute for lack of knowledge, and their distorted pictures of battle action are especially repugnant. On
the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves.

This narrative is an attempt to give a balanced perspective; to show that the private in the trenches had other thoughts than of the flesh, had often finer vision and strength of soul than those who would fit him to their sordid, sensation-seeking fiction. It is but a personal view, I know, yet I only ask pardon for my crudity of diction.

My diary is not infallible. There were lapses in its compiling which I could not prevent, but as I am striving for a correct picture as well as accuracy of detail, those who discover any debatable point will please bear it in mind. Every case of premonition I have described is actual fact; each of my own psychic experiences were exactly as recorded. The reader may term them fantasies, the results of overstrained emotion, what he will; there are many who know he cannot explain them.