Arthur Machen

“ And then he bent down and murmured in the soldier's ear.
"What," said the wounded man, "the place they used to tell us about in Sunday School? With such drink and such joy———"
His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. The black robe seemed to melt away from him. He was all in armour, if armour be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted up a great sword of flame. ”

“ I looked about me, and there on the left of us was a farm shelled into a heap of ruins, with one round chimney standing, shaped like the 'Flemish' chimneys in Pembrokeshire. And then the men in armour marched by, just as I had seen them—French regiments. The things like battle-maces were bomb-throwers, and the metal balls round the men's waists were the bombs. ”

“ If, for example, a man has made an anthology of great poetry, he may well write an introduction justifying his principle of selection, pointing out here and there, as the spirit moves him, high beauties and supreme excellencies, discoursing of the magnates and lords and princes of literature, whom he is merely serving as groom of the chamber. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago. ”

“ But Rome. Greece may be dead or in the currant trade. Rome is alive and immortal. Do not talk to me about Signor Giolitti, who is quite sure that the only things that matter in this new Italy, which is old Rome, are her commercial relations with Germany. Rome of the legions, our ancient mistress and conqueror, is alive to-day, and she cannot be for an ignoble peace. ”

“ There have been some who have held that the earthly conflict is but a reflection of the war in heaven; what if it be reflected infinitely, if it penetrate to the uttermost depths of creation? And if a speck of dust be a cosmos—a universe—of revolving worlds? There may be battle between creatures that no microscope shall ever discover. ”

“ The chaplain gasped. And he stared very straight at the soldier, having seen, as the soldier's friend might have put it, many cities of men. He knew, too, that the best of soldiers are not always the bond slaves of the truth. ”

“ And I've seen men draw their swords many a time; but I'll take my oath to this: I've never seen before hell-fire coming out of a scabbard. But I see it then in Gallipoli.
"But I believe what frightened me was the fright of the Turks, and you know they're difficult people to frighten. They screamed out 'Ginny! Ginny!'—which is queer enough, when you come to think of it—and then, poor . . . fellows, there were no Turks. They were gone; and I knew I was as white as paper. But it was like flaming, burning fire eating them up alive. ”

“ A great many had things like battle-maces swinging by their sides, and all these fellows carried a sort of string of big metal balls round their waist. Then a dozen regiments went by, every man with a steel shield slung over his shoulder. The last to go by were cross-bowmen."
In fact, it appeared to Delamere Smith that he watched the passing of a host of men in mediæval armour before him, and yet he knew—by the position of the sun and of a rosy cloud that was passing over the Worm's Head—that this vision, or whatever it was, only lasted a second or two. ”

“ Most of the Prussians stayed in the ploughed field. Karl Heinz's scream had frozen the blood of the English soldiers, but it had also ruined the major's plans. He and his men, caught all unready, clumsy with the burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of them returned. The rest of the force were attended to by an English burying party. According to custom the dead men were searched before they were buried, and some singular relics of the campaign were found upon them, but nothing so singular as Karl Heinz's diary. ”

“ Never since the world began was such a war as this: surely Marlborough and the Duke, Talbot and Harry of Monmouth, and many another shadowy captain must be riding among our horsemen. The old gods of war are wakened by this loud clamour of the guns. ”

“ Such as it was, "The Bowmen" appeared in The Evening News of September 29th, 1914.
Now the journalist does not, as a rule, dwell much on the prospect of fame; and if he be an evening journalist, his anticipations of immortality are bounded by twelve o'clock at night at the latest; and it may well be that those insects which begin to live in the morning and are dead by sunset deem themselves immortal. Having written my story, having groaned and growled over it and printed it, I certainly never thought to hear another word of it. ”

“ Now my friend's ignorance was in itself evidence—not evidence that there had been no supernormal intervention, certainly; but strong evidence proving that Miss Campbell was wrong when she said that "everybody" who had fought from Mons to Ypres had seen the visions. Let us take "everybody" generously, and make it mean the majority of the soldiers engaged. Let us again be over generous, and allow that ten thousand men of the Expeditionary Force had been killed in action or had died of their wounds by November. ”

“ And the appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common English practice; it is held Popish by most of our countrymen. But angels, with certain reservations, have retained their popularity, and so, when it was settled that the English army in its dire peril was delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. ”

“ There is one palmary and striking difference between the evidence of the two soldiers and the mass of foolish gossip which I have treated in the former part of this introduction. The gossip, as I still believe, derived proximately or remotely from the story of "The Bowmen." In "The Bowmen" heaven is implored and the help of heaven granted when the British Army and the whole cause of the Allies were, by the hypothesis of the tale, entering on their agony. The need was dire, the cause admitted of no delay: "dignus erat vindice nodus." Help came to earth from heaven when earth was helpless. ”

“ All the lands are astir. It is not enough that Asia should be humming like an angry hive and the far islands in arms, Australia sending her young men and Canada making herself a camp. When we talk over the war news, we call up ancient names: we debate how Rome stands and what is the matter with Greece.
*⁠*
As for Greece, I have ceased to talk of her. If I wanted to say anything about Greece I should get down the Poetry Book and quote Lord Byron's fine old ranting verse. "The mountains look on Marathon—and Marathon looks on the sea." ”

“ And I got out and crept round, and away I goes running down the street, yelling for all I was worth, just as our chaps were getting round the corner at the bottom. 'Bang, bang!' went the guns, behind me and in front of me, and on each side of me, and then—bash! something hit me on the head and over I went; and I don't remember anything more till I woke up here just now."
The soldier lay back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he saw that there were other people in the room besides the minister in the black robes. One was a man in a big black cloak. ”

“ Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church, considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place than the average tavern; still, as I say, a man's age masters him, and clouds and bewilders his intelligence, and the real story of "The Soldiers' Rest," with its "sonus epulantium in æterno convivio," died at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the actual story, as here printed, got written. And in the meantime the plot of "The Bowmen" occurred to me. ”

“ They look a bit like it; not like the other Indian troops. A different style of thing altogether."
So the soldier told of the devices of the men with the cookeries (or kukris as pedants spell the word) ; how it was impossible to hear them or to see them as they lurked in shadows or slid like snakes upon the ground, how they could throw those curving knives of theirs with sure, deadly aim.
"They've got ways that seem a bit queer to us," he said; "but they're wonderful fighting men; there's no denying it." ”

“ In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels and nothing else, and must be angels, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become "the Angels of Mons." In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.
And here, I conjecture, we have the key to the large popularity of the delusion—as I think it. We have long ceased in England to take much interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of St. George, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. ”

“ There's lots of odd corners in the British Empire that hardly anyone does know anything about, and the best of it is they're all full of first-rate fighting men. The fact is we've the knack of training them; black or white, or yellow or mixed; it don't matter. I've known niggers from I don't know where or which way that were fine soldiers."
The chaplain allowed the soldier to run on, acting on the pastoral direction of George Herbert as to the wisdom and kindness of letting a body talk. ”

“ I take it, then, that the origins of "The Bowmen" were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal seats to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling's story of the ghostly Indian regiment got into my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always there; and so "The Bowmen" was written. ”

“ The war is already a fruitful mother of legends. Some people think that there are too many war legends, and a Croydon gentleman—or lady, I am not sure which—wrote to me quite recently telling me that a certain particular legend, which I will not specify, had become the "chief horror of the war." ”

“ But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint ”

“ There is decidedly a white robe, and I think I can see feet, passing very slowly before me at this moment while I write.
There is no space here for continuous extracts from Karl Heinz's diary. But to condense with severity, it would seem that he slowly gathered about himself a complete set of sensory hallucinations. First the auditory hallucination of the sound of a bell, which the doctor called tinnitus. Then a patch of white growing into a white robe, then the smell of incense. At last he lived in two worlds. He saw his trench, and the level before it, and the English lines ”

“ She has written to the Editor of The Evening News denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The Psychical Research Society's expert confesses that no real evidence has proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the battlefield have been "hallucinated," and proceeds to give the theory of sensory hallucination. She forgets that, by her own showing, there is no reason to suppose that anybody has been hallucinated at all. ”

“ We had almost reached the end of the retreat, and, after marching a whole day and night with but one half-hour's rest in between, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Langy, near Paris, just at dawn, and as day broke we saw in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up into squadrons—fine, big men, on massive chargers. ”

“ I myself have hated this business of writing ever since I found out that it was not so easy as it looks, and I can always spare a little sympathy for a man who is driving a pen to the task of putting words in their right places. ”

“ Someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has talked to a soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. But that is not evidence; and not even Sam Weller at his gayest would have dared to offer it as such in the Court of Common Pleas. So far, then, nothing remotely approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention during the Retreat from Mons. ”

“ The two types are, of course, very different, just as a French word is in reality utterly different in its connotations from the English word which the dictionary supplies as its exact equivalent. Still, in a certain loose but practical sense, the one word does translate the other, and so the English clergyman of whom I am thinking is a very rough translation of the French abbé of the old régime. The two varieties of the cleric have this one mark in common: that neither is at heart a cleric at all. ”