War Letters from the Living Dead Man by Elsa Barker

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.