During World War I, many soldiers went to the front carrying lucky charms shaped like swastikas—these were British soldiers in the last years before the swastika was given a sinister new meaning. In A Supernatural War, British historian Owen Davies examines a gamut of “supernatural” actions and sightings that accompanied a war of unprecedented technological slaughter. Some stories of spectral intervention on the battlefield began as fiction but spread virally (yes, without the internet) as if they were fact. Meanwhile, charlatans predicted the future. Davies is especially amusing when visiting conflicting astrological predictions produced on both sides of the conflagration. Occasionally, eerie eyewitness accounts of strange sights ring with true belief. Davies has delved into the sources and emerged with an interesting conclusion: World War I did not increase public interest in the para-rational, as some historians have held, but only gave it a new and horrible context.
