Wannein Nat
An evil spirit. (See Burma.) War, Occult Phenomena during the: A surprising number of ideas regarding the supernatural have crystallized around the circumstances of the war. Perhaps the most striking of these was the alleged vision of angels at Mons. The first notice regarding this, or at least the most important and public record of the occurrence, was that contained in the Evening News for September 14th, 1915, in Which Mr. Machen described the evidence as given to him by an officer who was in the retreat from Mons. This officer was a member of a well-known army family and was a person of great credibility, who stated that on August 26th, 1914, he was fighting in the battle of Le Cateau, from which his division retired in good order. On the night of the 27th," he says, "I was riding along the column with two other officers.... As we rode along I became conscious of the fact that in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were marching I could see a very large body of horsemen. the other two officers had stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in the fields. I told them what I had seen. The third officer confessed that he, too, had been watching these horsemen for the past twenty minutes. So convinced were we that they were really cavalry, that at the next halt one of the officers took a party of men out to reconnoitre and found no one there. The night then grew darker and we saw no more." .. 66 " Mr. Harold Begbie in his book On the Side of the Angels states that a vision of angels was seen in the retreat from Mons and gives the narrative of a soldier, who states that an officer came up to him " in a state of great anxiety and pointed out to him a "strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighbourhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the centre having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the centre one. They appeared to have a long, loose-hanging garment of a golden tint and they were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour." All the men in the battalion who saw this with the exception of five were killed. Mr. Begbie goes on to say that he was told by a nurse that a dying soldier spoke to her of the reluctance of the Germans to attack our line, "because of the thousands of troops behind us." This man had heard German prisoners say so and fully believed in the phantasmal nature of those supporting hosts.
In his monograph on the Bowmen at Mons, Mr. Machen put forward the idea that those seen before the retreat from Mons were the spirits of the English bowmen who had fought at Agincourt and this idea gained wide prevalence, an interesting monograph being written upon it by Mr. Ralph Shirley. Men from the front, too, have stated to interviewers that phantasms of the dead frequently appeared in the space between the German and British trenches called "No Man's Land." 66 Mr. Shirley has also written an excellent pamphlet on Prophecies and Omens of the Great War" dealing with the various oracular utterances on the gigantic struggle, which may be referred to with confidence.
Stories, too, were current in the earlier times of the war regarding the appearance of saintly and protective figures resembling the patrons of the several allied countries. Thus the English were convinced that in certain engagements they had beheld the figure of Saint George mounted on a white charger and the French were equally sure that the figure in question was either Saint Denis or Joan of Arc. Wounded men in base hospitals asked for medallions or coins on which the likenesses of these saints were impressed in order to verify the statements they made.