“The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of ‘spiritualism’ is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a sÉance.”—T.H. Huxley.

Professor Huxley was never a prisoner of war in Turkey; otherwise he would have known that “spiritualism,” provided its truth be taken as demonstrated, has endless other uses—even for honest men. Lieutenant Hill and I found several of these uses. Spiritualism enabled us to kill much empty and weary time. It gave “True Believers” satisfactory messages, not only from the world beyond, but also from the various battle-fronts—which was much more interesting. It enabled us to obtain from the Turks comforts for ourselves and privileges for our brother officers. It extended our house room, secured a Hunt Club for our friends, and changed the mind of the Commandant from silent and uncompromising hostility to a post-prandial friendliness ablaze with the eloquence of the Spook. Our Spook in Yozgad instituted a correspondence with the Turkish War Office in Constantinople. (Hill and I flatter ourselves that no other Spirit has dictated letters and telegrams to and obtained replies from a Government Department in any country.) It even altered the moral outlook of the camp Interpreter, a typical Ottoman Jew. It induced him to return stolen property to the owner, and converted him to temporary honesty, if not to a New Religion (whether or not the same as the “New Revelation” of which Sir A. Conan Doyle is the chief British exponent we do not quite know). Finally, what concerned us more, it helped us to freedom.

There is a good deal about spiritualism in this book because the method adopted by us to regain our liberty happened to be that of spiritualism. But the activities of our Spook are after all only incidental to the main theme. The book is simply an account of how Lieutenant Hill and I got back to England. The events described took place between February 1917 and October 1918. The incidents may seem strange or even preposterous to the reader, but I venture to remind him that they are known to many of our fellow prisoners of war whose names are given in the text, and at whose friendly instigation this book has been written.^[1]

One thing more I must add. I began my experiments in spiritualism with a perfectly open mind, but from the time when the possibility of escape by these means first occurred to me I felt little concern as to whether communication with the dead was possible or not. The object of Lieutenant Hill and myself was to make it appear possible and to avoid being found out. In doing so we had many opportunities of seeing the deplorable effects of belief in spiritualism. When in the atmosphere of the sÉance, men whose judgment one respects and whose mental powers one admires lose hold of the criteria of sane conclusions and construct for themselves a fantastic world on their new hypothesis. The messages we received from “the world beyond” and from “other minds in this sphere” were in every case, and from beginning to end, of our own invention. Yet the effect both on our friends and on the Turks was to lead them, as earnest investigators, to the same conclusions as Sir Oliver Lodge has reached, and the arrival of his book Raymond in the camp in 1918 only served to confirm them in their views. We do not know if such a thing as a “genuine” medium exists. We do know that, in the face of the most elaborate and persistent efforts to detect fraud, it is possible to convert intelligent, scientific, and otherwise highly educated men to spiritualism, by means of the arts and methods employed by “mediums” in general.

When we reached England Lieutenant Hill and I thought our dealings with spiritualism had served their purpose, but we now hope they may play an even better part. If this book saves one widow from lightly trusting the exponents of a creed that is crass and vulgar and in truth nothing better than a confused materialism, or one bereaved mother from preferring the unwholesome excitement of the sÉance and the trivial babble of a hired trickster to the healing power of moral and religious reflexion on the truths that give to human life its stability and worth—then the miseries and sufferings through which we passed in our struggle for freedom will indeed have had a most ample reward.