Captain Honig, like the good commanding officer he was, did his best to treat the whole matter with sceptical contempt, but he was soon to have a rude awakening.
Leaving Heligoland on New Year’s Day, 1918, U65 called at Zeebrugge en route to her war station in the English Channel. During her stay in port three men reported that they had seen the ghost. All three had only that day joined the ship, and, so far as could be ascertained, had no previous knowledge of the haunting.
Towards dusk of 21 January, the U-boat was in a position about fifteen miles due south of Portland Bill. The weather was rapidly worsening, with fierce gusts and a rising sea which threw sheets of spray over the bridge. Captain Honig and two look-outs, one on either side, were on watch, crouching behind the meagre shelter of the canvas screens on which the spindrift rattled like rifle-fire. At 4.30 exactly the starboard look-out was amazed to see a figure in officer’s uniform, without coat or oilskins, standing right in the bows, apparently impervious to the seas that burst around him. Then the apparition turned, and, even in the failing light, the stupefied sailor was able to recognize the features of the officer whose pitiful remains lay buried in the naval cemetery at Wilhelmshaven. “Lord God, it’s the ghost!” he shrieked, and, staggering back with outstretched hands, bumped violently into the captain at the after end of the narrow bridge. That officer, cursing roundly, peered forward in his turn, and what he saw struck him, in the words of his official report, “sprachlos” – speechless. But training and discipline always tell, and automatically he shouted for the reserve watch below. As they tumbled up the hatch they found the captain and the look-outs pointing excitedly to the deserted foredeck, which showed only the white foam of the breaking seas. To the new arrivals Honig lamely explained that he had simply been testing their alertness.
Thenceforward a cloud of depression enfolded U65. Men were disinclined to be alone, and none would venture unaccompanied into the forward torpedo-room. Possibly due to suggestion, more men than ever swore they saw the ghost, and one, at least, said that it greeted him in passing. Fear gripped the vessel in those winter days amidst the grey seas of the Channel.
Nevertheless she completed her patrol and returned safely to Bruges, her new operational base, early in February. No doubt eager for relaxation after his many worries, Captain Honig went ashore on the first night in port to visit the Officers’ Club, but on his way there the air-raid sirens sounded. He was about to enter a shelter when a shell-splinter decapitated him before the eyes of several members of his crew. The headless body was carried aboard U65, and that night one officer and eight men saw the ghost standing mournfully beside the canvas-shrouded corpse.
The matter was now far beyond a joke and Higher Authority intervened. No less a personage than the Admiral of Submarines visited U65 and personally questioned each of the crew. Officially sceptical he was nevertheless impressed by what he heard, especially when he received a unanimous request from the ship’s company for transfer to another boat. In theory this request was ignored, but in practice almost every man was drafted on one pretext or another over the next few weeks, and U65 was ordered into reserve at Bruges.
It was at this point that unorthodox methods were adopted by the Admiral to raise the morale of the new crew. A Lutheran chaplain, Pastor Franz Weber, then serving at the base, was summoned by the Senior Officer of Submarines and told the whole weird story. In response, the reverend gentleman suggested that he might conduct a service of exorcism to lay the unquiet spirit of U65. It could do no harm, he thought, and might possibly do a lot of good. To this the Admiral agreed, reporting his decision to the Naval Staff in Berlin. Pastor Weber duly held the service, but, unfortunately, it had unexpected results. For the new crew, already despondent and nervous, were gravely upset by this official recognition of the ghost. As one man they applied for transfer from the boat, but this time the request was brusquely refused.
Early in May a new Commanding Officer was appointed, Lieutenant-Commander Schelle. A strict disciplinarian, he refused to tolerate “any damned nonsense about ghosts”, and made it clear that any man who so much as mentioned the word would have cause to regret it. As if in justification of his uncompromising attitude the fearsome tales died down, and the next two operational cruises were without incident. In June, however, the ghost reappeared, and two men deserted rather than sail in that haunted ship. They were arrested and tried by court-martial, but they sturdily maintained that nothing would induce them to return to U65. Sentenced to death, both were reprieved and drafted to a penal battalion on the Western Front. (One, at least, survived the war, and wrote an excellent account of his experiences in the submarine in a journal devoted to psychical research.)
On 30 June, U65 sailed on what was to be her last voyage. True to form, her death was to be as mysterious as her life, for no real explanation of her loss was ever found. The main facts, however, are well authenticated.
Early in the morning of 10 July the US submarine L2 was patrolling at periscope depth nine miles off Cape Clear on the southern Irish coast. Suddenly she sighted a German U-boat on the surface, cruising slowly as she charged her batteries. She was U65. Conditions were ideal and the American captain manoeuvred his vessel into the attacking position. He was about to give the order to fire when there was a tremendous explosion. As soon as the mountain of water had subsided the startled officer saw that his prospective victim had vanished, leaving masses of wreckage and oil-slick on the calm surface.
There have, of course, been a number of theories to explain her destruction. She may have been torpedoed by another German submarine in mistake, for there were a number of these operating in the vicinity at the time, but I have been unable to trace any official report to that effect. It is also possible that yet another defective warhead (as had happened at the outset of her career) had exploded, setting off a chain reaction among the others. That would account for the tremendous violence of the explosion which L2 had noted.
The explanation of this strange story? There is none that I can see. In 1921, Professor Dr Hecht, a very distinguished psychologist, conducted a profound investigation into the whole matter, seeking out and questioning as many witnesses as he could trace. He had access to the archives of the German Admiralty, but even with these facilities he could produce no satisfactory explanation of the haunting of U65. As a man of science he naturally deprecated any suggestion of the supernatural, but in his conclusion he rather ruefully, as it seems to me, refers to Hamlet’s dictum to the sadly puzzled Horatio.
There are also more things in the sea than our philosophy can yet compass.
“Vengeance Is Mine”
Algernon Blackwood
Location: Louvain, France.
Time: March, 1918.
Eyewitness Description: “The spell of this woman’s strange enchantment poured over him, seeking the reconciliation he himself could not achieve. Yet the reconciliation she sought meant victory or defeat; no compromise lay in it. . .”
Author: Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), like Arthur Machen, was a rebel against conformity and turned his back on a strict religious upbringing to travel across North America and make his living as a reporter and short story writer. One of his earliest successes was “A Haunted Island” (1899), a narrative in the first person set on a remote Canadian island haunted by a murderous Indian, which bears the hallmarks of personal experience. Later stories were to contain similar ingredients of supernatural insight and after Blackwood had become a familiar figure broadcasting on UK radio and television, he was labelled, “The Ghost Man”. During the First World War, he was initially a Red Cross worker and then recruited for “secret service” work, following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham to operate a network of agents in France and Switzerland. From his war experiences came several short stories including, “Wireless Confusion”, “The World-Dream of McCallister” and particularly “Vengeance is Mine”, which has echoes of Arthur Machen’s classic. Here, the narrator is pondering if the ancient gods are f
avouring not the British, but the Germans, and finds himself thrust into a horrifying situation when the soul of a terribly wronged young woman demands the sacrifice of an enemy POW.
1
An active, vigorous man in Holy Orders, yet compelled by heart trouble to resign a living in Kent before full middle age, he had found suitable work with the Red Cross in France; and it rather pleased a strain of innocent vanity in him that Rouen, whence he derived his Norman blood, should be the scene of his activities.
He was a gentle-minded soul, a man deeply read and thoughtful, but goodness perhaps his out-standing quality, believing no evil of others. He had been slow, for instance, at first to credit the German atrocities, until the evidence had compelled him to face the appalling facts. With acceptance, then, he had experienced a revulsion which other gentle minds have probably also experienced – a burning desire, namely, that the perpetrators should be fitly punished.
This primitive instinct of revenge – he called it a lust – he sternly repressed; it involved a descent to lower levels of conduct irreconcilable with the progress of the race he so passionately believed in. Revenge pertained to savage days. But, though he hid away the instinct in his heart, afraid of its clamour and persistency, it revived from time to time, as fresh horrors made it bleed anew. It remained alive, unsatisfied; while, with its analysis, his mind strove unconsciously. That an intellectual nation should deliberately include frightfulness as a chief item in its creed perplexed him horribly; it seemed to him conscious spiritual evil openly affirmed. Some genuine worship of Odin, Wotan, Moloch lay still embedded in the German outlook, and beneath the veneer of their pretentious culture. He often wondered, too, what effect the recognition of these horrors must have upon gentle minds in other men, and especially upon imaginative minds. How did they deal with the fact that this appalling thing existed in human nature in the twentieth century? Its survival, indeed, caused his belief in civilization as a whole to waver. Was progress, his pet ideal and cherished faith, after all a mockery? Had human nature not advanced . . .?
His work in the great hospitals and convalescent camps beyond the town was tiring; he found little time for recreation, much less for rest; a light dinner and bed by ten o’clock was the usual way of spending his evenings. He had no social intercourse, for everyone else was as busy as himself. The enforced solitude, not quite wholesome, was unavoidable. He found no outlet for his thoughts. First-hand acquaintance with suffering, physical and mental, was no new thing to him, but this close familiarity, day by day, with maimed and broken humanity preyed considerably on his mind, while the fortitude and cheerfulness shown by the victims deepened the impression of respectful, yearning wonder made upon him. They were so young, so fine and careless, these lads whom the German lust for power had robbed of limbs, and eyes, of mind, of life itself. The sense of horror grew in him with cumulative but unrelieved effect.
With the lengthening of the days in February, and especially when March saw the welcome change to summer time, the natural desire for open air asserted itself. Instead of retiring early to his dingy bedroom, he would stroll out after dinner through the ancient streets. When the air was not too chilly, he would prolong these outings, starting at sunset and coming home beneath the bright mysterious stars. He knew at length every turn and winding of the old-world alleys, every gable, every tower and spire, from the Yieux Marché, where Joan of Arc was burnt, to the busy quays, thronged now with soldiers from half a dozen countries. He wandered on past grey gateways of crumbling stone that marked the former banks of the old tidal river. An English army, five centuries ago, had camped here among reeds and swamps, besieging the Norman capital, where now they brought in supplies of men and material upon modern docks, a mighty invasion of a very different kind. Imaginative reflection was his constant mood.
But it was the haunted streets that touched him most, stirring some chord his ancestry had planted in him. The forest of spires thronged the air with strange stone flowers, silvered by moonlight as though white fire streamed from branch and petal; the old church towers soared; the cathedral touched the stars. After dark the modern note, paramount in the daylight, seemed hushed; with sunset it underwent a definite night-change. Although the darkened streets kept alive in him the menace of fire and death, the crowding soldiers, dipped to the face in shadow, seemed somehow negligible; the leaning roofs and gables hid them in a purple sea of mist that blurred their modern garb, steel weapons, and the like. Shadows themselves, they entered the being of the town; their feet moved silently; there was a hush and murmur; the brooding buildings absorbed them easily.
Ancient and modern, that is, unable successfully to mingle, let fall grotesque, incongruous shadows on his thoughts. The spirit of medieval days stole over him, exercising its inevitable sway upon a temperament already predisposed to welcome it. Witchcraft and wonder, pagan superstition and speculation, combined with an ancestral tendency to weave a spell, half of acceptance, half of shrinking, about his imaginative soul in which poetry and logic seemed otherwise fairly balanced. Too weary for critical judgment to discern clear outlines, his mind, during these magical twilight walks, became the playground of opposing forces, some power of dreaming, it seems, too easily in the ascendant. The soul of ancient Rouen, stealing beside his footsteps in the dusk, put forth a shadowy hand and touched him.
This shadowy spell he denied as far as in him lay, though the resistance offered by reason to instinct lacked true driving power. The dice were loaded otherwise in such a soul. His own blood harked back unconsciously to the days when men were tortured, broken on the wheel, walled up alive, and burnt for small offences. This shadowy hand stirred faint ancestral memories in him, part instinct, part desire. The next step, by which he saw a similar attitude flowering full blown in the German frightfulness, was too easily made to be rejected. The German horrors made him believe that this ignorant cruelty of olden days threatened the world now in a modern, organized shape that proved its survival in the human heart. Shuddering, he fought against the natural desire for adequate punishment, but forgot that repressed emotions sooner or later must assert themselves. Essentially irrepressible, they may force an outlet in distorted fashion. He hardly recognized, perhaps, their actual claim, yet it was audible occasionally. For, owing to his loneliness, the natural outlet, in talk and intercourse, was denied.
Then, with the softer winds, he yearned for country air. The sweet spring days had come; morning and evening were divine; above the town the orchards were in bloom. Birds blew their tiny bugles on the hills. The midday sun began to burn.
It was the time of the final violence, when the German hordes flung like driven cattle against the Western line where free men fought for liberty. Fate hovered dreadfully in the balance that spring of 1918; Amiens was threatened, and if Amiens fell, Rouen must be evacuated. The town, already full, became now over-full. On his way home one evening he passed the station, crowded with homeless new arrivals. “Got the wind up, it seems, in Amiens!” cried a cheery voice, as an officer he knew went by him hurriedly. And as he heard it the mood of the spring became of a sudden uppermost. He reached a decision. The German horror came abruptly closer. This further overcrowding of the narrow streets was more than he could face.
It was a small, personal decision merely, but he must get out among woods and fields, among flowers and wholesome, growing things, taste simple, innocent life again. The following evening he would pack his haversack with food and tramp the four miles to the great Foret Verte – delicious name! – and spend the night with trees and stars, breathing his full of sweetness, calm and peace. He was too accustomed to the thunder of the guns to be disturbed by it. The song of a thrush, the whistle of a blackbird, would easily drown that. He made his plan accordingly.
The next two nights, however, a warm soft rain was falling; only on the third evening could he put his little plan into execution. Anticipatory enjoyment, meanwhile, lightened his heart; he did his daily work more competently, the spell of the ancient city w
eakened somewhat. The shadowy hand withdrew.
2
Meanwhile, a curious adventure intervened.
His good and simple heart, disciplined these many years in the way a man should walk, received, upon its imaginative side, a stimulus that, in his case, amounted to a shock. That a strange and comely woman should make eyes at him disturbed his equilibrium considerably; that he should enjoy the attack, though without at first responding openly – even without full comprehension of its meaning – disturbed it even more. It was, moreover, no ordinary attack.
He saw her first the night after his decision when, in a mood of disappointment due to the rain, he came down to his lonely dinner. The room, he saw, was crowded with new arrivals, from Amiens, doubtless, where they had “the wind up.” The wealthier civilians had fled for safety to Rouen. These interested and, in a measure, stimulated him. He looked at them sympathetically, wondering what dear home-life they had so hurriedly relinquished at the near thunder of the enemy guns, and, in so doing, he noticed, sitting alone at a small table just in front of his own – yet with her back to him – a woman.
She drew his attention instantly. The first glance told him that she was young and well-to-do; the second, that she was unusual. What precisely made her unusual he could not say, although he at once began to study her intently. Dignity, atmosphere, personality, he perceived beyond all question. She sat there with an air. The becoming little hat with its challenging feather slightly tilted, the set of the shoulders, the neat waist and slender outline; possibly, too, the hair about the neck, and the faint perfume that was wafted towards him as the serving girl swept past, combined in the persuasion. Yet he felt it as more than a persuasion. She attracted him with a subtle vehemence he had never felt before. The instant he set eyes upon her his blood ran faster. The thought rose passionately in him, almost the words that phrased it: “I wish I knew her.”
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 24