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INTRODUCTION
Through the Dark Glass
During the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Private A. M. Burrage of
the Artists Rifles had some form of premonition he described as seeing
“through the Dark Glass”. Shortly before his platoon was to attack the
German lines, he recalled in 1930, their commander smiled at something
Burrage said, and “as he smiled, I saw Death looking at me from out of
his eyes, and I knew that his number was up.” The bluntness of the trench
slang cannot disguise what was obviously a terrifying experience. “I can’t
describe what I saw,” Burrage continues. “It was just Death, and it made
me afraid in a ghastly, shuddering way. The momentary transfiguration
was just as unpleasant as if his features had melted into the bones of a
death’s head.” The young officer was killed a few minutes later.
The notion of seeing “through a glass, darkly” derives from the Bible
(1 Corinthians 13:12) and suggests something of Burrage’s Catholic
upbringing. It also places him in a distinguished tradition of super-
natural storytelling: Sheridan Le Fanu had reworked the phrase forIn a
Glass Darkly(1872), the landmark collection containing his masterpieces
“Green Tea” and “Carmilla”. Most importantly however, the incident typi-
fies Burrage’s approach to the supernatural, from its everyday language to
the way that quotidian realities are suddenly transformed into something
sinister and macabre. In his work, ghosts manifest themselves without
warning in commonplace surroundings—rented rooms, railway carriages,
hotels, a party game, a holiday cottage—and are more likely to be the
spirits of the relatively recently departed than malign ancient forces or
nameless cosmic horrors.
They are therefore quite different from the ghosts conjured by many
of his contemporaries. Burrage admired M. R. James (who grudgingly
admitted that his stories “keep on the right side” and were “not alto-
gether bad”!), but his own fiction was set in a world far removed from
the academic antiquarianism of “Casting the Runes” (1911) or the Latin
cryptograms of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904), and his ghosts
were more human than the “intensely horrible face ofcrumpled linen”
that terrifies the hapless Parkins at the finale of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll
Come to You, My Lad” (1904). Burrage avoided the mysticism of Arthur
Machen, the pantheism of Algernon Blackwood, and the dreamy poetry
of Walter de la Mare. His writing has something of the briskness of E. F.
Benson’s “spook stories”, but his characters are usually less socially elevated
(his work shows a notable awareness of the injustices wrought by wealth
and class), and he lacks Benson’s enthusiasm for the monstrous. The
bioluminescent giant caterpillar of “Negotium Perambulams...” (1923)
or the shadowy thing that “waved as if it had been the head and forepart
of some huge snake” in “And No Bird Sings” (1928) have no place in
Burrage’s world.
He was also remarkably adaptable, moving from stories of gentle
whimsy and sentimental reincarnations to outright horror, and at times
using elements of science fiction such as timeslips and suggestions of
alternative realities. The aim of his stories was modest, but his simple
desire “to give the reader a pleasant shudder, in the hope that he will take
a lighted candle to bed with him” disguises a writer who, at his best, was
as skilful and imaginative as any of his more famous peers.
In a 1921 essay, “The Supernatural in Fiction”, Burrage expressed his
admiration for the perfect fusion of style and content in Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw(1898), a story which he felt “opens up little avenues
of thought, pushes us, and sets us wandering down them to go alone to
he edge of places into which we dare not look”. He admitted though that
James was anything but an easy read and his own stories used less manda-
rin methods much closer to those of the popular writers he praised, such
as Barry Pain (whoseStories in the Dark[1901]was a favourite collection),
W. W. Jacobs (Burrage singled out “The Monkey’s Paw” [1902] and “The
Toll House” [1909] for particular praise), and Oliver Onions (whose “The
Beckoning Fair One” he rightly saw as the highlight of Onions’ 1911 col-
lection,Widdershins). Frequenting the many pubs of Fleet Street, Burrage
often found himself in the company of journalists and reporters, and he
seems to have preferred their directness and economy to self-conscious lit-
erary affectation. Like H. G. Wells, whose plain style influenced his own,
Burrage saw himself as more akin to a journalist than a Jamesian artist.
He certainly had a journalist’s ear for a good story, and several of the tales
in this collection show how he exploited the reading public’s fascination
with sensational murder trials in the age of capital punishment.
Above all, he was a thoroughly professional writer who combined an
understanding of the literary marketplace with an uncanny ability to star-
tle and unnerve. His imagery is often striking, as when in one story here,
an encounter with the supernatural makes the narrator’s flesh shrink,
“as you see a strip of gelatine shrink and wither before the heat of a fire”.
“For the Local Rag” (1930) skilfully combines these aspects of his work,
in being a sideways look at his conception of the ghost story and, in its
deadline-driven protagonist, “secretly proud of his calling, but used long
since to be snubbed, patronized, and abused”, something of a self-portrait.
Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956) was born in Hillingdon,
Middlesex. His father (also called Alfred) and his uncle, E. Harcourt
Burrage, both wrote for publications such asThe Boys of Englandand
The Robin Hood Library,but their unceasing efforts guaranteed only a
precarious prosperity. When Alfred senior died suddenly in 1906 leaving
a wife and two children, his son’s life changed almost overnight. Writing
was in young Alfred’s blood—he had already published the occasional
school story—and now, rather than going to university as his father had
intended him to do, he left education and immediately began making
use of his family contacts, contributing toChumsand other boys’ papers.
From these he moved into the adult market, quickly establishing himself
as versatile, hard-working, and extremely reliable. Burrage always claimed
to be lazy, but he clearly thrived on deadline adrenaline. He soon began
to see the rewards of his labours, though he preferred the swift returns
from short stories and serials to the uncertainties of royalty payments.
Before war broke out in 1914, he was publishing across a range of genres,
from school stories to romantic comedy, throwing in tales of crime (he
wrote a couple of Sexton Blake stories), adventure, and the supernatural
along the way and gracing the pages of prestigious monthlies such as
Pearson’s,Cassell’s, andtheLondon Magazine. He even managed to con-
tinue writing while on active service from December 1915, recalling how
an editor wrote to him in the trenches to ask whether he could, “have
one of your light, charming love stories of country house life by next
Thursday”.
Burrage had written supernatural fantasy stories such as “The Wrong
Station” (1916) during the war, but after being invalided out of the army
in 1918, he came into his own. During the 1920s, the ghost story enjoyed
widespread popularity, and writers were able to publish their work in
anthologies as well as in periodicals and individual collections. Benefitting
from the patronage of David Whitelaw, editor of theLondon, Burrage hit
a rich vein of form between 1925 and 1930, publishing 28 stories in the
magazine during that time. Wary of relying on a single outlet, he con-
tributed another twenty to other magazines in the same period, some of
which were anthologized by his friend, Dorothy L. Sayers, in influential
books such asGreatShortStoriesofMysteryandHorror(1928). A selection
of theLondontales was collected in two books of his own,Some Ghost
Stories(1927) andSomeoneintheRoom(1931), both of which were well
received. Perhaps surprisingly however, neither was reprinted despite the
presence of tales such as “Smee”, “The Waxwork”, and “The Sweeper”, and
he published no further collections.
As the market for ghost stories dwindled during the 1930s and 1940s,
Burrage moved into other fields, working as hard as ever. Jack Adrian,
who edited a collection of his weird tales in 1988, estimated that he may
have published as many as 1600 stories during his fifty-year career, with
40 appearing in theEveningNewsduring the final six years of his life. His
full output remains unknown, and it may be that for all Adrian’s deter-
mined research—he speculated that Burrage may have written 100 ghost
stories—other tales are yet to be discovered in the back issues of forgotten
periodicals.
Burrage’s most famous and controversial work is his memoir of his
army service,WarisWar, published in 1930 under the nom de guerre,
“Ex-Private X”, the same name being used forSomeone in the Roomthe
following year. It is a vivid and often shocking book, which is openly
contemptuous of what Burrage saw as a hypocritical and often cowardly
officer class. It is equally unforgiving of the French civilians Burrage
encountered behind the lines, its outspokenness making it a book which
was more talked about than bought. Burrage was somewhat disappointed
by its limited success, but he made effective use of his wartime experiences
elsewhere, notably in “The Recurring Tragedy”, a bleak complement to
more famous wartime tales with a Christian undercurrent, such as Arthur
Machen’s “The Bowmen” (1914) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gardener”
(1925). This was typical of Burrage’s working methods. Always on the
look-out for “copy”, his stories drew inspiration from his schooldays, from
a dismal period of flat-hunting with his mother and sister after his father’s
death (“The Little Blue Flames”), his Cornish holidays (“The Running
Tide”), and a trip to Madame Tussauds (“The Waxwork”), never wasting
an opportunity to put life at the service of art. This imbues his best stories
with a strong sense of authenticity, something helped by his eye for telling
x i iv i x 1 2 3 T h x e 2 i
details, his realistic dialogue, and the unfussy style he used throughout his
long career.
Burrage’s reliance on the periodical market and one-off payments
rather than royalties meant that he preferred the immediate rewards of
publication to those of posterity. He did not reprint many of his stories,
did not adapt them for the theatre or cinema, or succeed in establishing
himself in the United States: a television version of “The Waxwork” was
screened as part of the series,Alfred Hitchcock Presents, though not until
1959. Most of his short stories were ephemeral achievements paid at the
rate that Charles Dorby receives in “For the Local Rag”, 30 shillings per
thousand words (around £100 by today’s standards). Always at work on
the next commission, Burrage gave published pieces little thought once
they appeared in print. A handful survived in anthologies, but it was
not until 1967 that there was another significant collection of his work,
Between the Minute and the Hour: Stories of the Unseen, which added five
new tales to work from his two books of ghost stories. This lack of vis-
ibility has meant that Burrage has received only cursory attention from
literary critics, and he remains too-little known despite the excellence of
his best work.
The stories collected here show the range of Burrage’s talent as a
writer of ghostly and supernatural fiction. Some ring ingenious changes
on established motifs such as vengeance from beyond the grave, some
are melancholy and consolatory, some are terrifying, while others have
a subtlety that lingers in the mind. All of them show an accomplished
craftsman working at the height of his powers, so light a candle or two,
bank up the fire, and pay no attention to those rustling leaves outside. It’s
only the wind.It’s only the wind.
Nick Freeman
