The Ghostly Army.
Closely connected with this are the numerous legends of the Ghostly Army. Thus, at Faizâbâd, the country people point out a portion of the Queen’s highway along which they will not pass at night. They say that after dark the road is thronged with troops of headless horsemen, the dead of the army of Prince Sayyid Sâlâr. The great host moves on with a noiseless tread; the ghostly horses make no sound; and no words of command are shouted to the headless squadrons. Another version comes from Ajmer. There for some time past a troop of four or five hundred horsemen, armed and dressed in green, issue from a valley in the neighbourhood of the city, and after riding about for some time, mysteriously disappear. They are believed to be the escort of the Imâm Husain, whose tragical fate is commemorated at the Muharram.
The same idea prevails all through India, and indeed all the world over. The persons killed at a recent disastrous railway accident haunt the locality, and have caused the breakdown of other trains at the same place.[70] The ghosts of the battle of Chiliânwâla began to appear very shortly after the battle, and Abul Fazl mentions the ghosts of Pânipat in the days of Akbar.[71] In America the anniversaries of the battles of Bunker’s Hill, Concord, Saratoga, and even as late as that of Gettysburg, are celebrated by spectral armies, who fight by night the conflict o’er again.[72] If you walk nine times round Neville’s Cross, you will hear the noise of the battle and the clash of armour, and the same tale is told of the battle of Marathon, which a recent prosaic authority attributes to the beating of the waves on the shore, while others say that these spectral armies of the sky are nothing more than wild geese or other migratory birds calling in the darkness.[73]