Phantoms of the Great War

Image via Wikipedia

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!”

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Image via Wikipedia

More Great War Stories:

The Angels of Mons

In Flanders’ Fields

A Poet of the Great War: Wilfred Owen