t he
was unable to sit his horse. The next day he was wounded inside his
right knee, not seriously, but sufficient to stop him riding for a week
or two. "I should never have thought anything more of it--I mean,
connecting the dream with the ill-luck--but in the South African
campaign there were quite remarkable instances. You see, at such times
when you are playing hide-and-seek with shrapnel, officers and men get
very chummy when we do get a spell for a talk. The Tommies give us their
confidences, and ask us all kinds of strange questions about religious
and super-natural things."

Take premonitions, for example. How shall we account for the British
soldier's actual versions of the matter? There are countless stories in
this war, in every war, of men having a warning, a sub-conscious
certainty of death. The battlefield is armed with a full battery of
shot, which thrill with human interest and have around them a halo of
something uncanny, supernormal. It may be that in the stress and shock
of battle the strings--some of the strings--of the human instrument get
broken; that poor Tommy, gazing into the night of the long silence,
becomes a prey to morbid fancies, which presently are worked up into
premonitions. There may be something in this, but the men of inaction
are more prone to fancies than men on active service. Another theory
suggests that the same power within which questions, supplies an answer.
It may be so; but no one is anxious for the answer Death brings. One can
only smile at the crass stupidity of most of the explanations given by
those who deny the existence of super-natural agencies and powers. The
region of spiritual dynamics is destined to be the science of the
future.

In a somewhat sceptical age it is worth while noticing that from the
earliest dawn of history, under varying forms of government and
civilisation with which we are acquainted, the belief in premonitions
was unchallenged. The old Greeks and Latins were the keenest thinkers
the world so far has seen; yet they believed in ghosts, omens, and
premonitions. (They would smile in lofty scorn at some of the
superstitions to-day taught under the Elementary Education Act of 1870.)
Unbelief in such things super-natural, therefore, cannot be accepted as
a sign of lofty mentality. A journalistic friend was staying with me
some few months ago. We were sitting smoking rather late after dinner.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked. "Don't be so absurdly