Myths and Legends of the Second World War by James Hayward Page B

one, whom the French called the Comrade in White, seemed to be everywhere at once. At Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons and Ypres, everywhere men were talking of him with hushed voices.
    The writer continues, explaining that he had hardly expected such phenomenal help should he be injured in battle. Then, during an advance on the enemy trenches, he was hit in both legs, and lay immobile in a shell crater until nightfall.
    The night fell, and soon I heard a step, but quiet and firm, as if neither darkness nor death could check those untroubled feet. So little did I guess what was coming that, even when I saw the gleam of white in the darkness, I thought it was a peasant in a white smock, or perhaps a woman deranged. Suddenly, with a little shiver of joy or fear, I don’t know which, I guessed that it was the Comrade in White. And at that very moment the German rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung his arms out as though in entreaty, and then drew them back till he stood like one of those wayside crosses that we saw so often as we marched through France.
    And he spoke. The word sounded familiar, but all I remember was the beginning, ‘If thou hadst known,’ and the ending, ‘but now they are hid from thine eyes.’ And then he stopped and ushered me into his arms – me, the biggest man in the regiment – and carried me as if I had been a child. I must have fainted, for I woke to consciousness in a little cave by the stream, and the Comrade in White was washing my wounds and binding them up. It seems foolish to say it, for I was in terrible pain, but I was happier at that moment than ever I remember to have been in all my life before … And while he swiftly removed every trace of blood or mire, I felt as if my whole nature was being washed, as if all the grime and soil of sin were going, and as if I were once more a little child.
    I suppose I slept, for when I awoke this feeling was gone, I was a man, and I wanted to know what I could do for my friend to help him or to serve him. He was looking towards the stream, and his hands were clasped in prayer: and then I saw that he, too, had been wounded. I could see, as it were, a shot-wound in his hand, and as he prayed a drop of blood gathered and fell to the ground. I cried out. I could not help it, for that wound of his seemed to be a more awful thing than any that bitter war had shown me. ‘You are wounded, too,’ I said faintly. Perhaps he heard me, perhaps it was the look on my face, but he answered me gently ‘This is an old wound, but it has troubled me of late.’
    And then I noticed sorrowfully that the same cruel mark was on his feet. You will wonder that I did not know sooner. I wonder myself. But it was only when I saw his feet that I knew him.
    Several other contemporary accounts may be found in David Clarke’s excellent study, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians . Ultimately the Comrade in White seems always to have been identified with Jesus Christ, a fact reflected in contemporary illustrations such as the painting by G. Hillyard Swinstead (Plate 12). The basic concept has something in common with the more modern conception of near-death experience, which is perhaps explicable by medical science, although the white helper legend is heavily, if attractively, embroidered. The elements of deliverance and moral truth are particularly clear from the inference that Christ’s wounds had lately opened, no doubt as a result of Hun bullets and frightfulness. It is interesting, too, that like the resurgent angels in 1915 the story seems to have spread first from the vicinity of Bath and Bristol, rather than the front line, although this may be purely coincidental.
    A new twist on the legend of the white helper was published in the American magazine Fate in 1968. The author, an American clergyman from Massachusetts, claimed to have been told the story some 12