Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark and speak to passersby; they rise with the load of their sins upon them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, and they beg the passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news of those they loved or hated. And after a brief hour they sink back again into the dust.

I believe the story, for I have met those sad spirits. It was on a foggy evening in October—All Souls’ Eve—on the road from Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and Britons a year before faced the German hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were in a terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, was driving the motor-car; I was seated beside him. The headlights blurred like drowned eyes, and the open windshield dripped with wet. If we met a belated cart, or if we misjudged distances on that winding road, we would never reach our destination alive! But we were in a hurry, for it was All Souls’ Eve—the night of the dead.

Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church, beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us—a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale.

I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and looked through the lower part of the retina—a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. “Faster! Vite! Vite!” I yelled, suddenly grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency brake came on with a grind and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “Encore plus vite.”

We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.

“Sssss—Feld—Feld—Feldwebel war ich, aus Bayern—sechs—sechsundzwanzigsten—infanterie Regiment.”

I turned my head with an involuntary sob. There was absolutely nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.

“Do you see anything?” I demanded.

“Nothing, monsieur.”

“Do you hear or smell anything?”

We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said, quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.

Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked, frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them, fondling the severed member and wailing, “De Deutschers—the Germans!” A group of mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through like honey-comb.

“Feldwebel Stoner. KÖnig, Kaiser, Vaterland, sie leben hoch!” whispered a voice.

The swarming spirits grew till they darkened the mist. We flew through the empty corridors of Malines, and on to Waelhem—first of the Antwerp forts to fall—up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich, toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still the swarms grew, crowding closer and closer. The eyes of the dead peered like cats’ eyes in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to ice. The odour of dead clay was so strong I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed to press against my back and shoulders as if heavy wires were freezing into the flesh. “Light the dash-light, for God’s sake, Pierre!” I cried, hoping the new electric blur would banish the phantoms, but their sulphurous eyes glowed only the more in its feeble ray.

And the hissing, clicking, and rattling grew. “Feldwebel Stoner, aus Bayern, tot, Eppeghem, September dreizehn ... KÖnig, Kaiser, und Vaterland—hoch!” a voice shrilled; “De Deutschers! de Deutschers!” sobbed an echo after it. And then, with a sudden access of horror, I remembered the saying of the peasants; I knew what had wakened those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished to question me; knew that I must answer their questions in the brief hour of their release; all of them I must answer!

“... leben hoch!” screamed the German voice. “Are we in Paris?”

“No!” I shouted.

“... suis FranÇais. Vive la France! ...Have we reached the Rhine?”

“No!”

“... Belge. Is Belgium free?”

“No!”

“... honour, the honour of my country, honour—honour?”

“No!”

“... Sozialdemokrat—for world-peace I fought, that the world might have peace. Is there peace?”

“No!”

“... curÉ of Weerloo, dead for my church and my flock. Are we victorious?”

“No!”

“Ask, Grutje, ask!” trilled a child’s voice, and a sad shriek answered it: “Home—the little farm on the road to Elewyt beside Kasteel Weerde—is it safe?”

I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the castle beside it, with two lath crosses leaning crazily over sunken graves in the dooryard. “No!”

“No, no, no!” The horrid refrain beat them back. By ones and tens and hundreds they asked and were denied. They had died as most men live, hoping to-morrow would bring bliss which yesterday withheld. They had died, as most men live, for dreams. In all the world there was no consolation for them, no word of honest hope or recompense. In all the world there was nothing for them but a shallow grave and a little wooden cross.

“I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, with the Marines. Have we whipped the Huns?”

“No!”

A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child, they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”

“No!... No!... No!...” And I fell forward in the car senseless.

When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west, purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into the black, silent city streets, I leaned my head far back and stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far, far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the tremendous stars.