About the end of August, 1915, that is to say, not many days before
his death, Raymond, who, as we have seen, was near Ypres, had been
photographed with the officers of his battalion by a travelling
photographer. On the 27th of September following, in the course of a
sitting with the medium Peters, the spirit speaking by Peters’ mouth
said, suddenly:
“You have several portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had
a good portrait of him--two, no, three. Two where he is alone and one
where he is in a group of other men. He is particular that I should
tell you of this. In one you see his walking-stick.”
Now at that time the members of Sir Oliver Lodge’s family did not know
of the existence of this group. They attached no great importance,
however, to the revelations but in subsequent sittings, notably on the
3rd of December, before the photographs had arrived, before they were
seen, more detailed information was received. According to the spirit’s
statements, the photograph was of a dozen officers or more, taken
out of doors, in front of a sort of shelter (the medium kept drawing
vertical lines in the air). Some were sitting down and some were
standing up at the back. Raymond was sitting; somebody was leaning on
him. There were several photographs taken.
On the 7th of December, the photographs arrived at Mariemont, Sir
Oliver’s house near Edgbaston. There were three copies, all differing
slightly, of the same group of twenty-one officers, those in the back
row standing up, the others seated. The group was taken outside a sort
of temporary wooden structure, such as might be a hospital shed, with
six conspicuous nearly vertical lines on the roof. Raymond was one of
those sitting on the ground in front; his walking-stick, mentioned
in the first revelation, was lying across his feet. And a striking
piece of evidence is that his is the only instance where one man is
leaning or resting his hand on the shoulder of another, in two of the
photographs, or, in the third, his leg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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