THE BOWMEN -
An Introduction
page 2
by Arthur Machen
Again I apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiæ of
my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that
the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. 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 places
to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling's story of the ghostly
Indian regiment got in my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always
there; and so THE BOWMEN was
written. I was heartily disappointed with it, I remember, and thought it--as I
still think it--an indifferent piece of work. However, I have tried to write for
these thirty-five long years, and if I have not become practised in letters, I
am at least a past master in the Lodge of Disappointment. 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. My colleague THE LONDONER praised it warmly to my face, as his kindly fashion
is; entering, very properly, a technical caveat as to the language of the
battle-cries of the bowmen. "Why should English archers use French terms?" he
said. I replied that the only reason was this--that a "Monseigneur" here and
there struck me as picturesque; and I reminded him that, as a matter of cold
historical fact, most of the archers of Agincourt were mercenaries from Gwent,
my native country, who would appeal to Mihangel and to saints not known to the
Saxons--Teilo, Iltyd, Dewi, Cadwaladyr Vendigeid. And I thought that that was
the first and last discussion of THE BOWMEN. But in a few days from its publication the editor of
THE OCCULT REVIEW wrote to me. He wanted to know whether the story had any
foundation in fact. I told him that it had no foundation in fact of any kind or
sort; I forget whether I added that it had no foundation in rumour but I should
think not, since to the best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly
interposition in existence at that time. Certainly I had heard of none. Soon
afterwards the editor of LIGHT wrote asking a like
question, and I made him a like reply. It seemed to me that I had stifled any BOWMEN mythos in the hour of its birth.
A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of
parish magazines to reprint the story. I--or, rather, my editor--readily gave
permission; and then, after another month or two, the conductor of one of these
magazines wrote to me, saying that the February issue containing the story had
been sold out, while there was still a great demand for it. Would I allow them
to reprint THE BOWMEN as a
pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving the exact authorities for the
story? I replied that they might reprint in pamphlet form with all my heart, but
that I could not give my authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure
invention. The priest wrote again, suggesting--to my amazement--that I must be
mistaken, that the main "facts" of THE BOWMEN must be true, that my share in the matter must surely
have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history. It
seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this
particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to
dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded,
unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in
April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling
ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous
size.
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be
told as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation to
their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and St.
George was the chief character. In one case an officer--name and address
missing--said that there was a portrait of St. George in a certain London
restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the
battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results. Another
variant--this, I think, never got into print--told how dead Prussians had been
found on the battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies. This notion amused
me, as I had imagined a scene, when I was thinking out the story, in which a
German general was to appear before the Kaiser to explain his failure to
annihilate the English.
"All-Highest,"the general was to say,"it is true, it is
impossible to deny it. The men were killed by arrows; the shafts were found in
their bodies by the burying parties."
I rejected the idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy.
I was therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too
fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles as hard fact.
Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed
between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the
cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it
disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German
cavalry. St. George, it will he noted, has disappeared--he persisted some time
longer in certain Roman Catholic variants--and there are no more bowmen, no more
arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I
think that I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
In THE BOWMEN my
imagined soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a shining about them." And Mr.
A.P. Sinnett, writing in the May issue of THE OCCULT REVIEW, reporting what he had
heard, states that "those who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings'
between the two armies." Now I conjecture that the word "shining" is the link
between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and
benevolent supernatural beings are 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. 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. And so soon as the
legend got the title "The Angels of Mons" it became impossible to avoid it. It
permeated the Press: it would not be neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely
quarters--in TRUTH and TOWN
TOPICS, THE NEW CHURCH WEEKLY (Swedenborgian) and JOHN BULL.
The editor of THE CHURCH TIMES has exercised a wise reserve: he awaits that evidence
which so far is lacking; but in one issue of the paper I noted that the story
furnished a text for a sermon, the subject of a letter, and the matter for an
article. People send me cuttings from provincial papers containing hot
controversy as to the exact nature of the appearances; the "Office Window" of THE DAILY CHRONICLE suggests scientific explanations of the
hallucination; the PALL MALL in
a note about St. James says he is of the brotherhood of the Bowmen of Mons--this
reversion to the bowmen from the angels being possibly due to the strong
statements that I have made on the matter. The pulpits both of the Church and of
Non-conformity have been busy: Bishop Welldon, Dean Hensley Henson (a
disbeliever), Bishop Taylor Smith (the Chaplain-General), and many other clergy
have occupied themselves with the matter. Dr. Horton preached about the "angels"
at Manchester; Sir Joseph Compton Rickett (President of the National Federation
of Free Church Councils) stated that the soldiers at the front had seen visions
and dreamed dreams, and had given testimony of powers and principalities
fighting for them or against them. Letters come from all the ends of the earth
to the Editor of THE EVENING
NEWS with theories, beliefs, explanations, suggestions.
It is all somewhat wonderful; one can say that the whole affair is a
psychological phenomenon of considerable interest, fairly comparable with the
great Russian delusion of last August and September. Now it is possible that some persons, judging by the tone of
these remarks of mine, may gather the impression that I am a profound
disbeliever in the possibility of any intervention of the super-physical order
in the affairs of the physical order. They will be mistaken if they make this
inference; they will be mistaken if they suppose that I think miracles in Judaea
credible but miracles in France or Flanders incredible. I hold no such
absurdities. But I confess, very frankly, that I credit none of the "Angels of
Mons" legends, partly because I see, or think I see, their derivation from my
own idle fiction, but chiefly because I have, so far, not received one jot or
tittle of evidence that should dispose me to belief. It is idle, indeed, and
foolish enough for a man to say: "I am sure that story is a lie, because the
supernatural element enters into it;" here, indeed, we have the maggot writhing
in the midst of corrupted offal denying the existence of the sun. But if this
fellow be a fool--as he is--equally foolish is he who says, "If the tale has
anything of the supernatural it is true, and the less evidence the better;" and
I am afraid this tends to be the attitude of many who call themselves
occultists. I hope that I shall never get to that frame of mind. So I say, not
that super-normal interventions are impossible, not that they have not happened
during this war--I know nothing as to that point, one way or the other--but that
there is not one atom of evidence (so far) to support the current stories of the
angels of Mons. For, be it remarked, these stories are specific stories. They
rest on the second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by "a soldier," by
"an officer," by "a Catholic correspondent," by "a nurse," by any number of
anonymous people. Indeed, names have been mentioned. A lady's name has been
drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the discussion, and I have
no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and
annoyance. 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 been 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. 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. Proof may come; if so,
it will be interesting and more than interesting.
But, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a
nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and
gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the
question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we
are ready to credit anything--save the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he
will swallow methylated spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be
"nobly wild, not mad." Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him
in body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him ignobly
wild and mad indeed. It took hard, practical men of affairs, business men,
advanced thinkers, Freethinkers, to believe in Madame Blavatsky and Mahatmas and
the famous message from the Golden Shore: "Judge's plan is right; follow him and
STICK."
And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs
undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the Church of
England. Christianity, as Mr. W.L. Courtney has so admirably pointed out, is a
great Mystery Religion; it is the Mystery Religion. Its priests are called to an
awful and tremendous hierurgy; its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the
bridge-makers between the world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact,
they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny
morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer
and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems to
me.
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