From _The Bowmen_, by Arthur Machen. Published in England by
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., and in America by
G.P. Putnam's Sons. By permission of the publishers and Arthur
Machen.
It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of
the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. 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; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into
their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with
all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English
company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line
that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter
annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military
expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this
angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would
be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would
inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this
corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked
at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them,
and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on
and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother
from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of
that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English
artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being
steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
"It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British
trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these
men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the
German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them.
And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous
host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand
remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing
on against them, column upon column, a gray world of men, ten thousand
of them, as it appeared afterwards.
There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man
improvised a new version of the battle-song, "Good-by, good-by to
Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there." And they all went on
firing steadily. The officer pointed out that such an opportunity for
high-class fancy shooting might never occur again; the Tipperary
humorist asked, "What price Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did
their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead gray bodies
lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and
they swarmed and stirred, and advanced from beyond and beyond.
"World without end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some
irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered--he says he
cannot think why or wherefore--a queer vegetarian restaurant in London
where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of
lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this
restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the
motto, "_Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius_"--"May St. George be a present
help to the English." This soldier happened to know Latin and other
useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the gray advancing
mass--three hundred yards away--he uttered the pious vegetarian motto.
He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout
him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so
that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted
in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something
between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar
of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it,
he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal
crying, "Array, array, array!"
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as
it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He
heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "St. George! St. George!"
"Ha! Messire, ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!"
"St. George for merry England!"
"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succor us!"
"Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow."
"Heaven's Knight, aid us!"
And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the
trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like
men who drew the bow, and with another shout, their cloud of arrows flew
singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.
The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope;
but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.
Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English.
"Gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're blooming
marvels! Look at those gray ... gentlemen, look at them! D'ye see them?
They're not going down in dozens nor in 'undreds; it's thousands, it is.
Look! look! there's a regiment gone while I'm talking to ye."
"Shut it!" the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, "what are ye gassing
about?"
But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the gray
men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural
scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they
shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.
All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry:
"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur, dear Saint, quick to our aid! St. George
help us!"
"High Chevalier, defend us!"
The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air,
the heathen horde melted from before them.
"More machine guns!" Bill yelled to Tom.
"Don't hear them," Tom yelled back.
"But, thank God, anyway; they've got it in the neck."
In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that
salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In
Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General
Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells
containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were
discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who
knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also
that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.