Summary: ill-fated palm-readings of some English officers before the outbreak of World War One, with their lines of life ending abruptly, as recounted by Osbert Sitwell and quoted by Colin Wilson; chiromancy, palmistry

Soldiers’ broken lines

Although the research I undertake is primarily text-based, I also listen to broadcasts, podcasts or videocasts and I watch audio-visual material (documentaries, filmed interviews and conferences, news footage, etc.) available online. As a result, I sometimes cannot recall the source for some noteworthy piece of information I have either read, seen or heard and I subsequently have to ask myself the following question: ‘Was it in a book borrowed from the library, in a book perused only in electronic format or was it even something I heard from somebody on the Internet?’ This often happens when I am accessing material in ‘exploratory mode’, i.e. when I am reading the first chapter of a book or when I am listening to, say, the first 10 minutes of a broadcast, especially if I am not doing so whilst being seated at my desk – as I still rely on the almost old-fashioned computing device that a desktop is to carry out most of my work (which is more a matter of being refractory to tablets and smartphones owing to my concerns about wifi than it is attributable to my being an ‘information technology dinosaur’, I would say).

So roughly from late September or early October of last year until the sixteenth of August of this year, I often wondered about a quote I had read somewhere and which had left a lasting impression in my mind. So much so that I even made a note about it in a file named ‘where did I come across_qm’ together with the following (initial) comment: ‘English medium/palm-reader who before the outbreak of WWI was left confounded by the broken lines (death) of the men who had consulted her; an account reported by a writer or a politician who did not give much credence to the paranormal’.

Despite several attempts on different search engines with keyword combinations like ‘newly wed English before World War I hands would die fortune-teller’ and ‘psychic men before World War I hands would die’ I could simply not retrieve the source for this supernatural and rather eerie account of palm-reading just before World War One broke out and several million young, middle-aged or even older men would be killed, most often than not within only a few seconds of the military operation they had taken part in or the bombing they had been subjected to for their greater misfortune.

Even with GoogleBooks, the closer I got were the following two sentences published in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Palmistry, 2nd edition: ‘It appeared half the young men of an entire generation were going to be lost. By 1918, this sad prediction had come true, because of World War I.’ This simply because the whole passage was not part of the book available to online readers on a limited preview basis. So this forced me to re-read the first chapters of three works of an author whom I deemed most likely to have used this quote in a book of his, namely Colin Wilson. My third attempt proved successful and I thus found the quote in full, not far into his bestseller The Occult.

Apparently, it was part of the autobiography of an English aristocrat, Osbert Sitwell, 5th Baronet, who died in Florence on 4th May 1969 (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sir-Osbert-Sitwell-5th-Baronet). This means that Osbert Sitwell’s works have not yet fallen in the public domain and as I have yet to look up how many paragraphs of a literary work still under copyright laws one is allowed to post online, I shall refrain from inserting the full passage here. What I shall do instead is paraphrase it and pepper my own text with a few words or sentences taken from the passage here and there.

Osbert Sitwell’s three-volume autobiography is called ‘Left hand, right hand!’ and, as the author makes clear in the last paragraph of his introduction to his autobiography, this title has a bearing on the subject matter of this entry: ‘I must explain the title I have chosen. The whole work is called Left Hand, Right Hand! because, according to the palmists, the lines of the left hand are incised inalterably at birth, while those of the right hand are modified by our actions and environment, and the life we lead.’ Even if he concludes the paragraph with the following caveat: [...] do not, gentle reader, conclude that [...] I accept the childish boundaries of chiromancy.’ [‘chiro’ means hand in Greek; ‘manteia’ means divination in the same language.]

Unsurprisingly, the (short) section where the passage with the palm-reading appears in volume three of his autobiography (a volume entitled Great Morning) is called ‘Before the war’. Curiously, Osbert Sitwell points out that among his comrades in arms (he was a soldier then), in June 1914, there was a mixture of apprehensiveness (first paragraph) and restlessness (second paragraph): ‘an anguished desire for change, like the sudden wave of restlessness that is said to seize on birds and animals before a volcanic disturbance’. The restlessness of his friends was expressed in their desire either to go on a polar expedition, to join a regiment posted in Africa, to start a ranch in South America or to travel to China. Osbert Sitwell skilfully adds a transitional and quasi theosophical sentence before scuppering the reader’s hope for any kind of happy endings to the projects of his four fellow officers: ‘It was as though some wind possessed the air and was scattering them, or as if their souls were growing impatient, still anchored within their bodies. Their plans, however, were not destined to be realised. By the late autumn, they were dead’.

Having shattered all hopes for any positive outcome, Osbert Sitwell, in the next paragraph, links the demise of his fellow officers to an ‘indication’ that had been made to them, a few weeks earlier, of their impending fate by ‘a celebrated palmist’ (claimed to have been consulted by none other than Winston Churchill, an aristocrat too). To her bewilderment (or, more probably, to her dismay), the palm-reader would keep noticing the same pattern, but it was one whose significance she could not grasp, merely notice: ‘I don’t understand it! It’s the same thing again! After two or three months, the line of life stops short, and I can read nothing’. Osbert Sitwell concludes his (second-hand [pun intended]) palm-reading account (as well as the paragraph) with the following: ‘when I was told by four or five persons of the same experience, I wondered what it could portend. . . . But nothing could happen, nothing.’

The only way to find out whether or not the above was made up by Osbert Sitwell would be to try to discover whether anybody in his entourage left in writing any reference to the same palm-reading sessions and to any subsequent early deaths among those whose palms had been read. It goes without saying that this would be far too time consuming. Personally, I do not have an opinion on palm-reading (also known as palmistry, chiromancy). However, I shall note that, according to Owen Davies (author of A supernatural war: magic, divination and faith during the first world war), some palmists were making good money during WWI (p.101). However, this does not necessarily imply that their readings were accurate – even if Theresa Cheung, in The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World, writes that ‘Palmistry’s best-known twentieth century exponent, Count Louis Hamon, better known as Cheiro, was noted for the accuracy of his predictions’.

Finally, I opted for ‘Soldiers’ broken lines’ instead of ‘Soldiers’ broken palm lines’ because the first title leaves open the possibility of a reference to the front lines so characteristic of modern trench warfare (itself almost emblematic of World War One), to the firing-line, to the line of march (of a group of soldiers, be it a regiment or an army), etc. Therefore, a little ambiguity can sometimes be better, at least as far as titles are concerned.

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