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 their brothers 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 army 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 experts, 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 terrible 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 it's worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast ten times more fierce then any before it. So it was in these British trenches.

      There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts at those men; but even they were appalled as this seven times heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and rent 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.

      There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle song: "Goodbye, goodbye to Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there!" And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for fancy shooting might never occur again, the Germans dropped line after line, 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 grey bodies lay in companies and battalions; but 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 a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten queer dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steaks. 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 Saint 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 grey advancing mass — 300 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 incantation 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 this summons. He heard, or seemed to hear thousands shouting: "St. George! St. George!"

      "Ha! messire; ha! sweet saint, grant as good deliverance!"

      "St. George for merry England!"

      "Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us."

      "Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George; a long bow and a strong bow."

      "Knight of Heaven, 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 host.

*       *       *       *      *

      The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They bad no hope: but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.

      Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in plain English.

      "Gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're blooming marvels! Look at those grey . . . 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 talking about?"

      But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke: for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousand. 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!"

      The singing arrows 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 turpinite shells, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man what knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak, knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt bowmen to help the English.

      Last September Mr. Arthur Machen wrote the story of "The Bowmen" as a pure fantasy of the imagination; without any foundation of fact or rumour. The tale appeared in "The Evening News."

      Soon after its publication a legend arose comparable to the famous myth of the Russian hosts. It was very widely asserted and believed in quarters spiritually and intellectually far removed from each other that "The Bowmen" was, in fact, true, that the events described in it, or at least something very much like these events, had actually happened during the noble retreat from Mons.

      This rumour, myth, or legend has gone on increasing its branches and spreading its roots ever since. At first, the narratives of supernatural intervention during the retreat were little more than variants of "The Bowmen." The machinery of the tale was copied, its deus ex machina, St. George, was a prominent figure in these "true" tales. Afterwards, novelties were introduced. The Agincourt Bowmen disappeared, St. George vanished, and a host of angels became the deliverers.

      The story of "The Bowmen" has aroused so much interest that no back numbers of "The Evening News" containing the story are now obtainable; we therefore reprint it for the entertainment of the curious.

(THE END)