The Angels of Mons | Page 5

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.

The Bowmen
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 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 battlesong, "Good-bye, good-bye 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
high-class, 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, 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 Geogius--May St. George be a present help
to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless
things, and now, as he