James Wentworth Day was a writer who, in the fifties, achieved some fame through television with his racist ideas and his statements about homosexuals (who should be hanged). But he published some true ghost stories too, and in some of them he turned back to the battlefields of northern France and Flanders…

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The Ghostly Cavalry

Together with a Corporal Barr he 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…

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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!”

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Back to Report

Wentworth Day also related the true story Major S.E.G. Ponder told him, the Oriental traveller and novelist. Ponder served in World War One as a Regular gunner in a Heavy Battery of the Royal Artillery under a Major Apultree.

On a night in autumn 1916, a Captain “A” and a Lieutenant “B” were ordered to go up the German trenches, so Captain A could show Lieutenant B the field of fire. The parapet and the parados were built mainly of the bodies of dead Germans. For some reason they dead didn’t to decompose there, on the Somme. It had something to do with the soil. They simply looked like alabaster.

The Boches put down a heavy barrage that night and neither A nor B showed up. Ponder wasn’t particularly worried about them as there were several deep dug-outs they could get into.

Next morning, about six – he was having a mug of tea in the mess – Apultree appeared in the door. He was dead white and shaking like a leaf. “I’ve seen B,” he muttered. “But he’s dead!…”

And then, Apultree told Ponder how B had suddenly appeared in the door of his dug-out. “Ah! You’re back to report?” Apultree asked.

“Yes, sir! But only to tell you I was killed last night, sir!”

And indeed, there was a shell splinter at the back of his ear and right trough his head. Apultree saw it clearly, no doubt about that… before B disappeared forever.

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More Great War Stories:

The Angels of Mons

In Flanders’ Fields

A Poet of the Great War: Wilfred Owen