When I was sent to the base hospital at Camp Barkeley, early in December 1943, I had no idea I was seriously ill. I’d just completed basic training, and my only thought was to get on the train that would take me to medical school as part of the Army’s doctor-training programme. It was an unheard of break for a private, and I wasn’t going to let a chest cold cheat me out of it.

But days passed and I didn’t get better. It was 19 December before I was moved to the recuperation wing, where a jeep was to pick me up at 4 o’clock the following morning to drive me to the station.

A few more hours and I’d make it! Then about 9.00 p.m. I began to run a fever. I went to the sister and begged some aspirin. Despite the painkiller, my head throbbed, and I’d cough into the pillow to smother the sounds. At 3.00 p.m. I decided to get up and dress.

The next half-hour is a blur for me. I remember being too weak to finish dressing. I remember a nurse coming to the room, and then a doctor, and then a bell-clanging ambulance ride to the X-ray building. Could I stand, the captain was asking, long enough to get one picture? I struggled unsteadily to my feet. The whir of the machine is the last thing I remember.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a little room I had never seen before. A tiny light burned in a nearby lamp. For a while I lay there, trying to recall where I was. All of a sudden I sat bolt upright. The train! I’d miss the train!

Now, I know that what I am about to describe will sound incredible. I do not understand it any more than I ask you to; all I can do is relate the events of that night as they occurred. I sprang out of bed and looked around the room for my uniform. Then I stopped, staring. Someone was lying in the bed I had just left.

I stepped closer in the dim light, and then drew back. He was dead. The slack jaw, the grey skin was awful. Then I saw the right. On his left hand was the ring I had worn for two years. I ran into the hall, eager to escape the mystery of that room. Medical school that was the all-important thing - just getting there. I walked down the hall towards the outside door.

‘Look out!’ I shouted to a nurse bearing down on me. She seemed not to hear, and a second later had passed the very sot where I stood as though I had not been there.

It was too strange to think about. I reached the door, went through and found myself in the darkness outside, speeding towards the station. Running? Flying? I only know that the dark earth was slipping past while other thoughts occupied my mind, terrifying and unaccountable ones. The nurses had not seen me. What if the people at medical school could not see me either?

In utter confusion I stopped by a call box in a town by a large river and put my hand against the telephone. At least the phone seemed to be there, but my hand could not make contact with it. One thing was clear: in some unimaginable way I had lost my firmness of flesh, the hand that could grip that phone, the body that other people saw.

I was beginning to know too that the body on that bed was mine, unaccountably separated from me, and that my job was to get back and rejoin it as fast as I could.

Finding the base and the hospital again was no problem. Indeed, I seemed to be back there almost as soon as I thought of it. But where was the little room I had left? So began what must have been one of the strangest searches ever to take place - the search for myself. As I ran from one ward to the next, past room after room of sleeping soldiers, all about my age, I realized how unfamiliar we are with our own faces. Several times I stopped by a sleeping figure that was exactly as I imagined myself. But the ring was lacking, and I would speed on.

At last I entered a little room with a single dim light. A sheet had been drawn over the figure on the bed, but the arms lay along the blanket. On the left hand was the ring. I tried to draw back the sheet, but I could not grip it. And now that I had found myself, how could one join two people who were so completely separate? And there, standing before this problem, I thought suddenly, This is death. This is what we human beings call ‘death’, this splitting up of one’s self. It was the first time I had connected death with what had happened to me.

In that most despairing moment, the little room began to fill with light. I say ‘light’, but there is no word in our language to describe brilliance that intense. I must try to find words, however, because incomprehensible as the experience was to my intellect, it has affected every moment of my life since then.

The light, which entered that room, was from heaven. I knew because a thought was put deep within me: You are in the presence of God. I have called Him ‘light’, but I could also have said ‘love’, for that room was flooded, pierced, illuminated, by total compassion. It was a presence so comforting, so joyous and all-satisfying that I wanted to lose myself forever in the wonder of it.

But something else was present in that room. There also entered every single episode of my entire life. Here they were, every event and thought and conversation, as palpable as a series of pictures. There was no first or last, each one was contemporary. Each one asked a single question, What did you do with your time on earth?

I looked anxiously among the scenes before me: school, home, scouting and the cross-country team - a fairly typical boyhood, yet in the light of that presence it seemed a trivial and irrelevant existence.

I searched my mind for good deeds. Did you tell anyone about me? Came the question.

‘I didn’t have time to do much,’ I answered. ‘I was planning to, and then this happened. I’m too young to die.’

No one, the thought was inexpressibly gentle, is too young to die. And now a new wave of light spread through the room, already so incredibly bright, and suddenly we were in another world occupying the same space. I followed through ordinary streets and countryside’s, and everywhere I saw this other existence strangely superimposed on our familiar world.

It was thronged with people. People with the unhappiest faces I have ever seen. Each grief seemed different. I saw businessmen walking the corridors of the places where they had worked, trying vainly to get someone to listen to them. I saw a mother following a sixty-year-old man, her son, I guessed, cautioning him, instructing him. He did not seem to be listening.

Suddenly I was remembering myself, that very night, caring about nothing but getting to medical school. Was it the same for these people? Had their hearts and minds been all concerned with earthly things, and now, having lost earth, were they still fixed hopelessly here? I wondered if this was hell: to care most when you are most powerless.

I was permitted to look at two more worlds that night. I cannot say ‘spirit world’s, for they were too real, too solid. Both were introduced the same way a new quality of light, a new openness of vision, and suddenly it was apparent what had been there all along. The second world, like the first, occupied this very surface of the earth, but it was a vastly different realm. Here was no absorption with earthly things, but - for want of a better word - with truth.

I saw sculptors and philosophers here, composers and inventors. There were universities and great libraries and scientific laboratories that surpass the wildest inventions of science fiction.

Of the final world I had only a glimpse. Now we no longer seemed to be on earth, but immensely far away, out of all relation to it, and there, still at a great distance, I saw a city - a city, if such a thing is conceivable, constructed out of light. At that time I had not read anything on the subject of life after death. But here was a city in which the walls, houses, streets seemed to give off light, while moving among them were beings as blindingly bright as the One who stood beside me. This was only a moment’s vision, for the next instant the walls again closed around me, the dazzling light faded, and a strange sleep stole over me.

To this day, I cannot fully fathom why I was chosen to return to life. All I know is that when I woke up in the hospital bed in that little room, in the familiar world where I’d spent all my life, it was not a homecoming. The cry in my heart that moment has been the cry of my life since: to see that world again.

It was weeks before I was well enough to leave the hospital, and all that time one thought obsessed me: to get a look at my chart. At last I was left unattended. There it was in terse medical shorthand: Pvt. George Ritchie died 20 December 1943, double lobar pneumonia.

Later I talked to the doctor who had signed the report. He told me there was no doubt in his mind that I was dead when he examined me, but nine minutes later the soldier who had been assigned to prepare me for the morgue came running to him to ask him for a shot of adrenalin. The doctor gave me a hypo of adrenalin directly into the heart muscle, all the while disbelieving what his own eyes were seeing. My return to life, he told me, without brain damage or other lasting effect, was the most baffling circumstance of his career.

Today I feel that I know why I had the chance to return to this life. It was to become a physician so that I could learn about man and then serve God. And every time I have been able to serve by helping some broken-hearted adult, treating some injured child or counselling some teenager, then deep within I have felt that he was there beside me again.