First and Last (Belloc)/The Reveillon

There was in the regiment with which I served a man called Frocot, famous with his comrades because he had seen The Dead, for this experience, though common among the Scotch, is rare among the French, a sister nation. This man Frocot could neither write nor read, and was also the strongest man I ever knew. He was quite short and exceedingly broad, and he could break a penny with his hands, but this gift of strength, though young men value it so much, was thought little of compared with his perception of unseen things, for though the men, who were peasants, professed to laugh at it, and him, in their hearts they profoundly believed. It had been made clear to us that he could see and hear The Dead one night in January during a snowstorm, when he came in and woke me in barrack-room because he had heard the Loose Spur. Our spurs were not buckled on like the officers'; they were fixed into the heel of the boot, and if a nail loosened upon either side the spur dragged with an unmistakable noise. There was a sergeant who (for some reason) had one so loosened on the last night he had ever gone the rounds before his death, for in the morning as he came off guard he killed himself, and the story went about among the drivers that sometimes on stable guard in the thick of the night, when you watched all alone by the lantern (with your three comrades asleep in the straw of an empty stall), your blood would stop and your skin tauten at the sound of a loose spur dragging on the far side of the stable, in the dark. But though many had heard the story, and though some had pretended to find proof for it, I never knew a man to feel and know it except this man Frocot on that night. I remember him at the foot of my bed with his lantern waking me from the rooted sleep of bodily fatigue, standing there in his dark blue driver's coat and staring with terrible eyes. He had undoubtedly heard and seen, but whether of himself from within, imagining, or, as I rather believe, from without and influenced, it is impossible to say. He was rough and poor, and he came from the Forest of Ardennes.

The reason I remember him and write of him at this season is not, however, this particular and dreadful visitation of his, but a folly or a vision that befell him at this time of the year, now seventeen years ago; for he had Christmas leave and was on his way from garrison to his native place, and he was walking the last miles of the wood. It was the night before Christmas. It was clear, and there was no wind, but the sky was overcast with level clouds and the evening was very dark. He started unfed since the first meal of the day; it was dark three hours before he was up into the high wood. He met no one during all these miles, and his body and his mind were lonely; he hoped to press on and be at his father's door before two in the morning or perhaps at one. The night was so still that he heard no noise in the high wood, not even the rustling of a leaf or a twig crackling, and no animal ran in the undergrowth. The moss of the ride was silent under his heavy tread, but now and then the steel of his side-arm clicked against a metal button of the great cloak he wore. This sharp sound made him so conscious of himself that he seemed to fill that forest with his own presence and to be all that was, there or elsewhere. He was in a mood of unreal and not holy things. The mood, remaining, changed its aspect, and now he was so far from alone that all the trunks around him and the glimmers of sky between bare boughs held each a spirit of its own, and with the powerful imagination of the unlearned he could have spoken and held communion with the trees; but it would have an evil communion, for he felt this mood of his take on a further phase as he went deeper and deeper still into these forests. He felt about him uneasily the sense of doom. He was in that exaltation of fancy or dream when faint appeals are half heard far off, but not by our human ears, and when whatever attempts to pierce the armour of our mortality appeals to us by wailing and by despairing sighs. It seemed to him that most unhappy things passed near him in the air, and that the wood about him was full of sobbing. Then, again, he felt his own mind within him begin to be occupied by doubtful troubles worse than these terrors, an anxious straining for ill news, for bitter and dreadful news, mixed with a confused certitude that such news had come indeed, disturbed and haunted him; and all the while about him in that stillness the rushing of unhappy spirits went like a secret storm. He was clouded with the mingled emotions of apprehension and of fatal mourning; he attempted to remember the expectations that had failed him, friends untrue, and the names of parents dead; but he was now the victim of this strange night and unable (whether from hunger or fatigue, or from that unique power of his to discern things beyond the world) to remember his life or his definite aims at all, or even his own name. He was mixed with the whole universe about him, and was suffering some loss so grievous that very soon the gait of his march and his whole being were informed by a large and final despair.

It was in this great and universal mood (granted to him as a seer, though he was a common man) that he saw down the ride, but somewhat to one side of it in the heart of the high wood, a great light shining from a barn or shed that stood there in the undergrowth, and to this light, though his way naturally led him to it, he felt also impelled by an influence as strong as or stronger than the despair that had filled his soul and all the woods around. He went on therefore quickly, straining with his eyes, and when he came into the light that shone out from this he saw a more brilliant light within, and men of his own kind adoring; but the vision was confused, like light on light or like vapours moving over bright metals in a cauldron, and as he gazed his mind became still and the dread left him altogether. He said it was like shutting a gentleman's great oaken door against a driving storm.

This is the story he told me weeks after as we rode together in the battery, for he hid it in his heart till the spring. As I say, I believed him.

He was an unlearned man and a strong; he never worshipped. He was of that plain stuff and clay on which has worked since all recorded time the power of the Spirit.

He said that when he left (as he did rapidly leave) that light, peace also left him, but that the haunting terror did not return. He found the clearing and his father's hut; fatigue and the common world indeed returned, but with them a permanent memory of things experienced.

Every word I have written of him is true.