War Letters from the Living Dead Man by Elsa Barker Page A

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.
    I advise you to avoid for some years at least the actual scenes of these battles. You can go to Switzerland or to the more southern regions of France, but do not stay long in Northern France or Belgium, or in any other place that may be thus affected. The thought world of England is just now troubled, but the layer of astral matter immediately above the earth is not full of the awful emanations of death. Astral forms go there from the more terrible region, but in order to go they must have themselves broken away from the immediate scene of their worst suffering. It is easier to protect oneself from sad thought—forms than from the distracted astral entities and the “boiling” astral matter that lie above those battlefields.
    Why, even the field of Waterloo before this war was not a pleasant place to spend the night. After a lapse of time you may briefly visit the scenes of these recent battles, for the sake of the practical experience; but do not go there just yet. The best place in Europe for a long period will be the mountains of Switzerland. You should spend much time there. Do you remember telling me how, when a child, you used to see the forms of American Indians on the hills and in the valleys of your native State? They were those who many years before had walked those hills and valleys in the sunlight, and who were still held in the tenuous matter above that region. The eyes of childhood are sometimes very clear. Above those battlefields of Europe the sensitive eye may see for many years the forms of those who will not be able to make their escape. And I do not mean akashic records. War is hell, and the hell does not end with the signing of peace papers.
    That is one reason why we want you, and those others who believe in brotherhood, to carry that spirit of brotherhood among the nations that have been at war. You have no conception of the power of a quiet faith in a great and true idea. The man who really loves his fellows has a wider influence than his own immediate circle of friends. The atmosphere around him is permeated with that brotherly love, and sensitive souls can feel it. Some day sail up the Rhine with that sentiment in your heart.
    April 12

Letter 21
    A Soul in Purgatory
    Dare I talk to you of the purgatory to which the rage of battle conducts so many souls that only a little while before walked the earth as men, and went their daily round from house to office, loving their wives and children and exchanging worldly commonplaces in the intervals of work, all unmindful that they were hourly drifting toward the Great Event? Yes, I dare. We will follow one soul that I myself followed. His story I can reconstruct from memory, for every act of it is stamped upon my mind. No, I do not need brain cells to remember with. Neither will you—when you have escaped the prison of your brain cells. The man was an officer in an English regiment and he was a bachelor. Outwardly he was much like other men, but his consciousness was different. He lived in a world of his own, for he was a reader and a thinker. He was not a very good man. Not all Englishmen are good even now when England is at war, you who bristle at any criticism of your beloved maternal island—you who write for me!
    This man was not very good because there was so little love in his heart. He was not incapable of love, yet he was unable to awaken love in others, and so was soul-starved. But sometimes he was conscious of a great yearning, and when the yearning came he was impatient, and took a drink, or cursed his servant, or both. Sometimes when he was most impatient with the world and with himself, he went on a “spree.” The war began. His natural