Is there life after death? Are there ghosts? These questions related to the afterlife have plagued man probably since his appearance on Earth. But for many of the soldiers who were fighting lost in the vortex of the First World War, everything was clear.
Soldiers with nerves completely broken by tension, hunger, humidity, enemy snipers, the terrible multi-day bombardment of enemy artillery, were able to see anything...
But the soldiers often saw the ghosts of their dead colleagues sitting next to them in the trenches or following them in the attack. A Canadian soldier, William Byrd, was sleeping in an umbrella when his brother Steve woke him up. But the point is that Steve had been killed two years before at the beginning of WW1. Steve told him to get out of there immediately. William heard the "ghost" and moved away seconds after a German shell pulverized the skylight...
Private Wallace Reid was fighting on the Somme in 1916. A German shell hit his shelter and buried him alive. Reed managed to free himself. He was among corpses in an eerie stillness, as he later reported in a letter. Suddenly he saw something, something "invisible", "intangible", but something real who approached him, stood near him for a while and disappeared.
Canadian soldier Glenn Airiam wrote:“You feel the pulse of the thousands of dead white hands flinging through the mud, here and there as if they know you. You feel the presence of something that is not of this world".
Wounded Amos Maize wrote after his injury:“It seems strange to have the foresight of what so often happens. The night I was hurt, I had a constant premonition that something was going to happen ». Such stories were very common at the front, at the border between life and death.
Of course, the illusions of the soldiers could also be due to the almost permanent insomnia that tormented them when they were on duty at the front line, combined with the suffering, the thousands of corpses of enemies, relatives and friends rotting before their eyes, with the smell of decay to overwhelm them.
The battles on the Western Front were among the most horrific and bloodiest that history has recorded. But even everyday life in the trenches was just as horrible. Not by chance, with the threat of death hanging over them, many men became religious or superstitious with the supernatural, metaphysical or paranormal element – as each one wants – to dominate.
One of the most famous stories circulating at the time had to do with the Battle of Mons in August 1914. There the small British expeditionary force faced the German armies.
Immediately an army of knights and archers ghosts of the Middle Ages and the Hundred Years' War, intervened in favor of their British descendants and held the Germans, giving them time to retreat. The story spread quickly and the glory of Agincourt of 1415 was joined by the glory of Mons of 1914 in the pages of British newspapers that presented the matter as… real.
According to another variant, however, it was not ghosts who protected the British but angels, as a soldier had invoked the help of Saint George , the patron saint of England.
Worse still among the horrors of the trenches were stories of hideous death-eating creatures lurking in the mud, abandoned trenches and the dead zone between opposing armies.
In these stories, however, there may be a dose of truth as many civilians or deserters sometimes tried to grab what was useful from the killed, while there were also cases where soldiers who had gone insane resorted to cannibalism.
But many of the soldiers were sure that there was something...