The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

But enough. I shall not recount how I was arrested, nor tell of my subsequent ordeals. Suffice it to say that it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad, and that, ever since, I have foresworn carrying out commissions entrusted one by the insanity of others.

NOTE: The unfortunate narrator notices a shop sign and realizes he is not in the Russia of his past but in the Russia of the Soviets: what gives it away is the absence of one letter which used to decorate the end of words after consonants but is now omitted in the reformed orthography.

Vladimir Nabokov

3

Phantom Ranks

Supernatural at War

The Bowmen

Arthur Machen

Location:  Mons, France.

Time:  August, 1914.

Eyewitness Description:  “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 . . .”

Author:  Arthur Machen (1863–1947), born Arthur Llewellyn Jones in Caerleon, Wales, fell in love with London as a young man and moved to the capital to try and earn his living as a writer. For years he lived in a shabby rented room, existing on “dry bread, green tea and tobacco”, churning out journalism and short stories until he accidentally found fame with this story about cut-off British troops being rescued from the Germans by a ghostly St George and his archers from Agincourt. The story was published in the London Evening News and, despite Machen’s insistence that it was purely imaginary, rapidly became regarded as true and the centre of a legend that has persisted to this day. So entrenched did belief in the “account” become, that claims were even made that the corpses of dead Prussian soldiers had actually been found at Mons, their bodies pierced by arrow wounds. “The Bowmen” has subsequently often been cited as fact in histories of the supernatural as well as inspiring a virtual library of “faction” ghost stories set during wartime.

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 rain 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 grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.