By George M. Johnson, author of Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature: Grappling With Ghosts.
The annual observance of Remembrance Day has long been the official and accepted means of conveying our respect for those who sacrificed their lives in the cause of war. However, during and following the First World War, before an Armistice Day ceremony had even been conceived, how did people mourn their lost loved ones? Traditional funeral rites could not be observed because there were no bodies: soldiers were buried where they fell rather than being brought back to their native soil. Furthermore, 499,000 soldiers were listed as missing in action, and 173,000 were found but could not be identified. Many men died horrific deaths, rendering traditional rites meaningless, even a mockery, as soldier-poet Wilfred Owen conveyed in “Anthem For Doomed Youth”:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
Responses to these overwhelming losses were complex and varied. Some people created individual shrines in their homes composed of photographs, medals, letters, and personal items retrieved from the soldier’s body. Others had the impulse to go to battle sites to search for loved one’s graves, and many thousands did after the war. However, in order to cope with sorrow a significant number adopted some form of mysticism, the practice of focusing inward with the aim of achieving unity with the transcendental order. According to contemporary guru of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, this makes people receptive to messages from another plane. A prominent form of mysticism was spiritualism, the practice of communicating with departed spirits, usually through a medium. It attracted large numbers of the bereaved. In 1914 the Spiritualist National Union claimed 145 affiliate societies, and by 1937 there were 520, for total of about 250,000 members, with as many more spiritualist meeting places not associated with the union, and as many as 100,000 home séance circles. Even the Church of England reported favourably on the claims of spiritualism at the 1920 Lambeth conference.
By far the most famous soldier to communicate in this manner was 2nd Lieut. Raymond Lodge, who was killed near Ypres on the 14th September, 1915. His father happened to be the eminent scientist Sir Oliver Lodge, contributor to the development of radio-telegraphy, as well as many other inventions. Lodge had been a psychical researcher for many years, but the loss of Raymond and then his purported communications with Lodge and his wife convinced him that personality survived death. His spirit-soldier memoir Raymond (1916), with its descriptions of “Summerland” (as Raymond called the afterlife) became immensely popular and controversial, going through many editions during and after the war. 
Were these communications an example of the credulity of belief? I will leave that to each individual to decide, but I would argue that through this extended communication with his son, Lodge was able to renegotiate his relationship with him. Ironically, Lodge, a distant and preoccupied father of 12 children seems to have learned more about his youngest son and developed a more compassionate understanding of him in the afterlife. He learned, for example, about the popular songs that his son had loved to sing and his sense of humour.
Another eminent father, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was so impressed by his friend Lodge’s book that he publicly confirmed his convictions regarding spiritualism. Doyle, who had been an enthusiastic propagandist for and would-be participant in the First World War, thereafter directed his energies to proselytize about spiritualism, especially after the deaths from influenza of his son Kingsley in 1918 and his brother Innes in 1919, both soldiers. He became known as the St. Paul of spiritualism, claiming proudly in his autobiography Memories and Adventures that he travelled 55,000 miles, spoke to a quarter of a million people, and wrote hundreds of thousands of words proclaiming the truth of spiritualism. (He also spent a large proportion of his fortune on it). He too was able to renegotiate his fraught relationship with Kingsley (one of two neglected children from his first marriage) and to achieve some closure in a context where families did not have the chance to bury their dead soldiers. Although Doyle’s post-war writing failed to satisfy the expectations of his audience, it proved therapeutic for him. Through books like The Vital Message (1919) he provided consolation to thousands and responded conscientiously to their letters with compassion; he became an advocate for tolerance in spiritual matters, claiming that “All religions would be equal, for all alike produce gentle, unselfish souls who are God’s elect.” He even has Sherlock Holmes show rare compassion in a late story when he fears that Watson might die from a gunshot wound (“Adventure of The Three Garridebs” 1924).
By the time of Doyle’s death in 1930 he had found a new audience and had had a huge impact on thousands, as evidenced by those who packed into the Royal Albert Hall for his “happier burial service” (that he had requested), the world-wide tributes, and the curious claims regarding his spirit manifestation, which continue to this day (as in Dr. Roger Straughan’s A Study in Survival, 2009). For Doyle, Lodge and many others like them, including war propagandist Rudyard Kipling, their experimentation with mysticism, and particularly spiritualism (regardless of its truth value) and their writing about it became a more creative and therapeutic form of mourning than the conventional practice of mourning by drawing solace from state sanctioned war memorials and ceremonies.
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George M. Johnson is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. His publications include Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction, J.D. Beresford, and an award-winning comic play, Still Life With Nudes. His screenplay The Wonder was a finalist in the British Independent Film Festival and another screenplay Peace Pledge received Honorable Mention in the Euroscript Screenplay Competition. Johnson’s Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling With Ghosts has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan.For more information, please visit:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/mourning-and-mysticism-in-first-world-war-literature-and-beyond-george-m-johnson/?isb=9781137332028