War Letters from the Living Dead Man (8 page)

Do not be shocked when I tell you that there have been working in Europe during and before the present war “artificial elementals” that were created in the time of Atlantis. Those beings, for they have a force and a pseudo-individuality, have been used in this war by those (now reincarnated) who created them ages ago. They have drifted to their creators by the power of attraction. One such creature was destroyed last July, and I assisted in its destruction.

At the time of the birth of a new race, will has great dynamics. Use your will with the Law, not against it. Do you realize, you who put your desires above all things, that each of you is but a drop in the stream of souls? The drop that would isolate itself from the stream may be sucked up by the sun in the form of vapor and wait a long time before entering the stream again. Now do not take any of this as applying to my Brother who wants to soften the blow for his native land. I want to soften the future of my native land, and that is why I am writing about the new race that is going to be born in America. But if I should learn, through counsel with my Brothers or through individual inspiration, that it was best that the new race should be born elsewhere, I would work with the same devotion to bring it into being in that other place. And so would my Brother. We who work with the Law put the welfare of the human race above our own individual loves. All races are one race—the human race—and we work together as one.

April 10

Letter 19

The Rose-Veiled Stranger

One day the angel we call the Beautiful Being came to me leading another angel by the hand. Long association with this extraordinary being has taught me never to be surprised by anything it does. I accept its vagaries as expressions of a state of consciousness above and beyond my own, and much that I have learned during the last three years I owe to its whimsical but tender friendship for me. As I explained in my former writing, the Beautiful Being—whom we call an angel for want of a better term—has never shared the physical life of earth. It is a being of another evolution than the human, and for that reason its views of human life are uniquely valuable. It smiled as it came to me, leading by the hand another similar to itself but far less like mankind. Introductions in the celestial regions are often very unconventional; but the Beautiful Being, who has observed the life of men, sometimes amuses me by delicious mimicry of the ways of mortals.

“Rose-veiled one,” it now said to its angelic companion, “permit me to present you to my friend ‘X’, a Judge recently arrived from the planet Earth, who will consent I am sure to act as your cicerone over a section of territory where history is in the making. Ask him anything you will and he will answer you—if he can. He is still unlearned in the language of your distant star; but he can converse in thoughts with you whose coarsest vesture is a body of thought.” I expressed my pleasure at meeting the stranger, and asked if I should show it a battlefield. “I do not understand the idea—battlefield,” it answered; “but I should like to see it.” “You will understand far less when you have seen it,” smiled the Beautiful Being. It chanced that day that the opposing forces in France and Belgium were unusually active in the beginning of the Spring campaign, and I led my two friends to a point where they could watch the combat.

“What are those beings down there sending back and forth?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “Those objects are known as shells,” I replied. “Shells?” the stranger returned in bewilderment. The Beautiful Being answered for me. “Shells are elaborately convoluted houses in which our brothers of the great deep live and disport themselves.” The look of bewilderment increased on the face of the stranger. “My friend forgets,” I said, “that you know not the language of earth, where a word, an arbitrary symbol for an idea, may stand for two ideas very dissimilar.” “What are those objects that the beings down there are sending back and forth?” the stranger repeated. I have to translate its form of speech into ordinary English to make it intelligible. Literally, its communication would stand like this: “Objects beings sending reciprocally?”

From my long association with angels, both with these astral bodies and those without, such a form of speech is intelligible to me; and I answered, translating my cumbrous native idiom into the simpler language of ideas: “The objects that are hurled back and forth between those beings on the plain below us are explosive shells, with a marvelous power to shatter the forms of other objects and to scatter them in all directions.” “Is it a form of play?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “It is not,” I answered. “It is war.” “War?” All the horror that in my mind is associated with the word war was conveyed by my thought to the mind of the angelic visitor, and its rosy veil grew pale with pain. “What is this strange emotion that I feel?” it asked. “Truly, were it not for your presence here, my friends, I should desire to go away.” “The emotion that you feel,” I said, “is a sympathetic reflection of the emotions of war.” “And what is war?” “A horrible passion felt mutually and indulged by two opposing aggregates of souls, by which they are enabled to overcome their natural pity and to destroy each other’s bodies in vast numbers.”

The veil of the stranger grew almost white. “And does God permit this horror?” it asked. “He permits it on the planet Earth.” Now the word God is not an adequate translation of the idea expressed in the angel’s question, but let it stand. The real idea is untranslatable by any one word in any language of earth. It was a composite of Love and Time and Purpose, raised to the highest power, an idea for which I can find no other word than God. “Earth is a strange star!” the angel said. “The inhabitants of this world have a common saying to that effect,” I answered. “It is a fragment of race wisdom, handed down from their remote ancestors, who, when they first tried to adjust their celestial consciousness to the baffling conditions of this star on which they had been placed for their education, observed to one another, ‘This is a strange world.’” “And are they obliged to perpetrate this horror before us by the conditions of this planet?”

“No.” “Then why do they do it?” “From force of habit.” “Then was it ever necessary?” “In far away times,” I said, “men were more isolated than at present, there were fewer of them in incarnation, and a brilliant archangel who had their training in charge taught them to develop courage and resource, and to accentuate their egos, by struggling with each other, two by two.” “But there are millions of beings down there!” the angel exclaimed. “And I see bodies fall by thousands!” “That is what they call a great victory,” I said, “and one of their commanders gives to those who have slaughtered a vast number a little iron cross.” “An iron cross? Why iron?” “Iron is the metal of Mars,” I said, “Mars, their war god.” “And why a cross?” “It is the symbol of their Christ.” “The one who died down here to make men love one another?” “The same,” I admitted.

“Truly, I agree with the remote ancestors of these people, from whom they have inherited the saying, ‘This is a strange world.’” “Would you like to approach nearer?” I asked. The stranger hesitated, then said, with a patient smile: “My friend,” glancing at the Beautiful Being, “wishes me to learn something of this star. I will approach nearer.” We descended to perhaps a hundred feet above the lane which separated the enemies. “Look!” exclaimed the stranger. “The souls are leaving their bodies! Is that the purpose of this business, to free souls from bondage?” “Not directly,” I answered. “Each would like to hold the other in bondage; but being unable to do that to any great extent, they take the opposite way.” The stranger looked more confused. “My friend,” explained the Beautiful Being to me, “came from a region where the Law of Opposites does not apply.” “You have never taken me there in our wanderings!” I exclaimed.

“No, you are so attached to the Law of Opposites.” This was an old jest between me and the Beautiful Being. “Look!” the stranger interrupted me. “There is a soul coming toward us now.” I went forward to greet the newcomer. He was a German officer. “Welcome,” I said, but he seemed not to understand me. The face of his astral body was contorted, as if he had died in pain. Now the Beautiful Being seems to know all the languages of the earth; and though the purity of its nature is such that few on earth can understand it, yet when a soul leaves its body it can understand the speech of the Beautiful Being if there is anything in its nature that responds to the higher vibration which makes the life of that angel so intense and wonderful. “Welcome,” said the Beautiful Being to the soul, in the accents of his native land. “Where am I?” asked the bewildered soul. “You are in the region above the world,” the Beautiful Being answered. “You mean—“ “I mean that your name will be in the list of the dead.”

“Then it has come!” “Yes.” “But I always feared death.” “You see it is nothing to fear.” “Where is the Kaiser?” “At his headquarters.” “Can I not report to him?” “If you wish.” We moved farther east—slowly, for the newly freed soul had not yet learned that distance is nothing. We found the War Lord seated beside a table looking at a map. His face was drawn and haggard. “There,” I said to the stranger, “is the man who is believed, by the whole world outside his own country, to have caused this vast war.” The stranger (and also the soul) approached and read the thoughts in the brain of the War Lord. I give them as they were, disconnected, tragic in their import:

“The slaughter of our forces! God punish England! I am the Lord’s chosen! I cannot make a mistake! My generals have blundered. I will degrade—(the name of our newly arrived charge). This defeat is his fault. I ordered him to take those trenches. He has lost our own instead. I cannot make a mistake! I am the Lord’s chosen!” The Beautiful Being turned to the soul who had been a General. “Do you wish to report yourself to the Kaiser?” The eyes he turned to us were sad. “I will not trouble the Kaiser,” he said. A silence had fallen between us. After a little, the Beautiful Being turned to the General again, and its face was soft with pity. “Can I do something for you?” it asked. “Will you take me to my mother, who died of grief for my only brother’s death, in the early days of the war? I am very tired. I want to see my old mother.” The eyes of the rose-veiled stranger were luminous with wonder. “Why, there is even love in this strange star!” it said.

April 11

Letter 20

Above the Battlefields

Picture to yourself a battlefield, a long-stretching irregular double line of men and guns and horses and all the paraphernalia of war. In the old days on earth I once gave some study to the theory and practice of war, but that labor had little value in preparing me to study this war. Not only did it take for granted conditions that no longer exist, but my point of observation then was an imaginary station on one side or the other of an imaginary field; now I am really here, there and everywhere. I read the thoughts of the commanders on both sides, I am with the men in the trenches sometimes half-buried in mud and water, I am riding with the cavalry, I go forward with the guns of the artillery, I go out and up with the escaping spirits of the dead—go with them into the hell of confusion that almost always swallows them for a time after they are violently thrust from their bodies.

Truly, “War is hell!” Have no glorious delusions to the contrary, you who dwell in the haunts of peace and babble of what you know not. The horrors do not end when the guns cease firing. The dark and silent night of rain is full of souls in bewilderment and torment. Often one will grope his way hither and thither, seeking to find a trench-mate to whom he had become attached in the camaraderie of war—that sweet flower which grows up an ugly stem. Often they live over and over again the rage and madness of the attack; they plunge an imaginary bayonet into the form of an imaginary foe; or, if a mass of them are together, and they generally are, they strike recklessly at anything before them, conscious always of an opposing force. The General of whom I wrote in my last letter was a man of marked spiritual development; he soon broke away from the entanglements of matter; he was a devotee to whom his country was a god and his Emperor a hero to be followed with aspiration. But most men who die on the battlefields are common soldiers who fight because it is the will of the mass behind them. They generally go out into darkness for a time, and most of them wander in darkness and bewilderment for varying periods.

Some, on the contrary, are vividly conscious almost from the hour of death. These may attack the men of the opposing army when they sleep. The dreams of the battlefields are terrible in their intensity. Sometimes again, for in the general confusion distinctions may be quite lost, souls that had believed themselves enemies cling together in the tragic yearning of the dark that separates the worlds of the “invisible.” In their great need they do not know their former friends from their former enemies. Another pale flower that grows from the ugly stem of war! The astral forms of men of low development are often found here in shocking distortion, their consciousness only a glimmer, and with no power of feeling anything but pain. No wonder the dreams of the unselfish lovers of humanity are full of horror during these dark nights of the world, for there are many noncombatants in all lands whose hours of sleep are given to a devoted labor for the souls that need help so horribly. There is one man whom you know who bears at this time a burden almost superhuman, and speaks of it to no one.

It is needless for me to say how you yourself spent the nights of many months, and when we bade you cease that labor it was only that you might have more strength for the labor of writing these pages at my dictation. A soul still held in the flesh cannot work all day and all night. That is burning the astral candle at both ends. When you return to the countries now devastated by war, some of your friends will relate to you experiences similar to your own during these terrible months. They who can be used are called upon when the need is greatest, and the need is immense at this time. Realize that those souls in the lower regions of the astral world are actually in space near the ground of the physical planet. Those who hang over the battlefields where they met their fate are still thrilled or horrified by the noise of the battle horns, they can still hear the shriek of shells and feel the shattering force of the explosions. Day in, day out these unfortunate earthbound ones live over and over again the emotions of war, night after night they dread the morning when the sounds will begin again. They cannot get away. They are not free merely because their bodies are buried under a few feet of earth, or worse still left unburied.