Ghosts haunt accounts of World War One, appearing in memoirs, novels, short stories and poems. These ghosts have a diverse range of functions as they variously reflect the experience of the battlefield and life on the home front, as well as shaping more metaphysical considerations about life and death. Superficially, these ghosts appear as Gothic figures devoid of traditional Gothic intent. In war memoirs, ghosts rarely generate horror, often appearing as battlefield guides, or as seemingly benign presences behind the frontline, or as metaphors for exhaustion. Often the ghost is employed to capture the unreality of the battlefield, as in Blunden’s Undertones above. No-man’s-land becomes figured as a dead landscape inhabited by the living who await their possible imminent death. Or, as in Graves, sometimes the dead come back, with Private Challoner spied peering in through a window as a group of officers, celebrating their safe return from the front, embark on an epic meal of ‘new potatoes, fish, green peas, asparagus, mutton chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard’ (Graves 1967: 102). Challoner, excluded on metaphysical grounds (and quite possibly those of rank), salutes and moves on, leaving behind ‘nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement’ (102). There is something of survivor guilt here, but also a lament for a lost comrade who does not seem to resent his exclusion. For Sassoon the ghosts are seen en masse as ‘with an almost spectral appearance, the lurching brown figures flitted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin-helmets’ (Sassoon 1997: 76). They are simultaneously tangible, with ‘rifles’ and ‘basin-helmets’, and intangible, ‘spectral’ figures who have ‘flitted past’.