, the greater the
gloom the more he searches for the gleam, and sometimes it is vouchsafed
to him. There is no doubt that mind calls to mind. After all, time and
space are artificial things. They cannot be spiritual barriers. Why
should a mother, thinking of her lad at the front in a supreme moment of
affection and deep yearning, not be able to do what frequently happens
unconsciously among ordinary acquaintances? Often a thought will pass
from one mind to another in a moment of silence.

The uncanny under fire must take its place among things to be
investigated, the evidence is too convincing to be pooh-poohed. Science
and philosophy are now boldly entering the dim regions of the occult in
search of its laws; on the battlefield Tommy Atkins is already there
thinking over weird things and he comes to conclusions, finding the
lights by which he steers.

This chapter could not be complete without mentioning another mystery of
the battlefield: it is this--the number of instances in which the
Germans have savagely pounded a church with their artillery, only to
find on entering the ruin that the cross was still there erect and
intact. One Uhlan soldier climbed upon an altar to smash a crucifix,
slipped and put his ankle out. That may be a coincidence. Next moment a
shell killed him and one of his comrades, the crucifix remained
uninjured. Soldiers, French and British, talk of these uncanny things,
interpreting them in several ways, but each of these ways is the pathway
of the spirit--perhaps part of the altar steps on which men climb up
through the darkness to God.

II

WAR THE REVEALER

War is not only the Great Educator, it is the Great Revealer. Its
marches and bivouacs, its battles, its commonplaces and surprises, its
trials and its triumphs, are a singular school of experience. The
various impacts upon man's psychological anatomy produce strange
results. They seem like the blows of some Invisible Sculptor, producing
out of commonplace material a hero and it may be a demi-god. The opening
orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and
attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange
dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has
its theme, some song of spiritual things. His gaze is towards the sky
line and he sees strange things, a whole battery of lights each of which
is in its way a revelation. The battle chorus crying to the night of
long