Jay Winter

hose who went on pilgrimages to war cemeteries and sacred sites -

Verdun, Ypres, Langemark - also developed affinities with parents, widows, sons, and daughters like themselves, who were there to remember the dead. Mr and Mrs Wakeman returned to their son's grave in France in 1923. They took ad vantage of the services of the 'St Barnabas Hostels', simple hostelries not very different from the ones they had stayed in five years before. This organization was founded in 1919, after it was apparent that help was needed for the 'many Pilgrims miles from their hotels, vaguely wandering about in search of cemeteries and with no sign-posts to guide them thereto'.107 Instead of charging as much as

£35, as one London travel bureau did for a visit to Loos, the price of St Barnabas tours was at first £14 and then by 1923, only £4. The Wakemans, like other pilgrims, were met at Calais by a St Barnabas

'lady worker' .

. As Annette Becker has shown, after the war one Parisian parish priest, Abbe Alfred Keller, dedicated himself to creating a manifestation of Catholic compassion for 'humanity in distress' . He sponsored a housing project for poor families, each of which 'adopted' a dead soldier of the Great War. They were unrelated formally, but the dead man's name and dates of birth and death were over the door of each apartment.

n the courtyard is a chapel decorated by murals painted by Desvallieres. The murals portray the soldier's war as the way of the Cross.1 1 1 This 'Cite de souvenir', dedicated in 1934, still stands in a quiet street in the 14th arrondissemen t of Paris. Over the gate is the following inscription: 'To honour the dead by an act of life and so that large families can adopt them (une descendance adoptive).'112

Women played an important role in the spiritualist community. It is, therefore, not surprising that spiritualists were advocates of feminism and that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly anathematized the movement and especially the women within it.

Leviticus 20: 6

and Deuteronomy 18:10-12 left no doubt about the sin of attempting communion with the dead.

The work of Charcot on hypnotism and trances helped to popularize the paranormal, as, in later years, did Freud's theory of the unconscious.

The Revue spirite had been founded by Allan Kardec in 1858.

Mediums' tables sold for 10 francs in 1914; crystal balls sold for 10-40

francs, according to their size and purity. Mediums and healers placed notices in the Revue spirite

As a young man, and before he had become Kaiser, Wilhelm II dabbled in spiritualism with his friend Prince Eulenberg.14 J.C.F.

'To ease the pain and to try to get in touch.' The bereaved couple attended a seance led by a celebrated medium, Mrs Osborne Leonard, who spoke in the voice of a young Indian girl called Feda