The Weekly Machen
The following article is prefaced by an announcement of the upcoming book version of “The Bowmen.” For those who may be interested in the circumstances which made that book a bestseller, it is recommended to read the companion essay, Machen Study No. 50: Selling the Angels. Arthur Machen offered some interesting information in the below piece, including the approximate date of the famous story’s composition and evidence that the Mons Legend was not embraced by every leader of the English Church.
Great Demand for “The Bowmen” Story:
To Be Issued in Book Form
by
Arthur Machen
July 27, 1915
So great an interest has arisen in all quarters concerning Mr. Arthur Machen’s story of “The Bowmen,” first printed in our columns and its sequel of myth and rumour and discussion that “The Evening News” has determined to reprint the tale. It will be published under the title of “The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War” at the price of a shilling net. The volume will be issued by Messrs. Simpkin, Marhall and Co., and will contain in addition to “The Bowmen” three stories by Mr. Arthur Machen, all of which have appeared in “The Evening News.”
____
There was a terrible Sunday morning last August. The Weekly Dispatch told the story of the awful Retreat from Mons. In no respect did it exaggerate the fierceness of the furnace of fire through which our men had passed.
So I went to Mass that Sunday morning with an image in my mind of English soldiers rising from the shattered dust of their dead bodies with a glory about them, rising to eternal happy seats.
Then, instead of attending to the singing of the Gospel, I thought of the story of “The Soldier’s Rest,” which duly appeared in The Evening News.
It was a few days later, in the first week or so of September, that I hit on the notion which became “The Bowmen.” I thought it a fine idea, and wrote the tale about the fifteenth or sixteenth of September. It struck me as pretty good, good enough to be printed, to appear and then to lapse into forgetfulness, like most matter that has a sort of phantasmal, momentary life in newspapers. “There are certain insects that are born and die in a single day.” I certainly never imagined that I should ever hear “The Bowmen” mentioned after the day of its appearance.
Arrow Wounds
But, greatly to my amazement, this tiny spark of a story kindled a great fire. I suppose “The Bowmen” is about a thousand words in length; certainly ten thousand words must have been written concerning it.
The story of the gathering of a great cloud of legend and rumour and myth around my tale has been told before in The Evening News. The worlds of occultism and spiritualism went into that cloud. The editors of Light and the Occult Review have devoted much space to the tale, and to the consideration of the possibility of its being founded in fact. In private occult circles the wildest rumours ran about like fire in the heather; one gentlemen said that dead Germans had been found on the field of battle with arrow-wounds in their bodies.
The Church was equally interested. The tale was reprinted in many parish magazines; the clergy and their congregations were alike inflamed by the thought of St. George, our Patron, and the archers of Agincourt succoring the British Army. They believed that it was all true, and some of them were grieved when I told them that I had made it all up out of my own head.
And the Nonconformist bodies cast aside their ancient suspicion of the miraculous—of the miraculous that is not in the Bible. It must be said that by this time the Bowmen had become Angels, and St. George had disappeared.
Dr. Horton preached a sermon on the new version of the story. He told me afterwards that he was strongly inclined to believe in it; he considered it congruous with the spiritual experiences through which the Army had passed. Sir Joseph Compton-Rickett, President of the National Federation of Free Church Councils, spoke the other day of the visions seen by the men at the front.
The Churches and the Tale
Then the Chaplain-General, Bishop Taylor Smith, preaching at Harrow Chapel last Sunday, alluded to “Mr. Arthur Machen’s story of the vision at the Front.”
All these have been sympathetic critics, but Dean Hensley Henson, preaching last Sunday at Westminster Abbey, denounced the whole Legend of Mons as the monstrous issue of a journalist’s tale. If the Dean were reported accurately, he seems to have said that if this sort of thing were allowed to continue we should have people believing in miracles all over the country.
“The Bowmen” have invaded the modern “Pepys’ Diary” in Truth. The editor of John Bull says he doesn’t believe a word of it. The Church Times printed a sermon, a letter, and an article on the topic in its last issue. The Pall Mall Gazette, speaking of St. James, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday, said the Saint was of the company of the Bowmen of Mons. This was an allusion to St. James fighting for the Spaniards against the Moors. In this morning’s Daily Chronicle it is suggested that the problem of the “Angels of Mons” may possibly be solved by the consideration of a letter from one of Botha’s lieutenants. The lieutenant said that extreme fatigue induced hallucination: “everyone suffered.” The lieutenant himself saw “palaces and churches.”
Vision in Kensal Rise
And this morning we have received the following account of a vision of a soldier—seen not in France but at Kensal Rise. Our correspondent, Mr. Leonard Williams, received the account at first hand:
A curious story of telepathic thought-transference, accompanied by a ghostly vision, is reported on good authority from Kensal Rise. Two or three evenings ago a woman who lives in that neighbourhood heard a loud knocking at her front door. She opened it, but nobody was to be seen. On returning to the sitting-room, however, she noticed a dim figure in khaki, standing at the further end. After some seconds this figured melted away. The woman told her husband, and the next evening they received a visit from an old friend, a soldier just back from the front, to whom she related the incident. He asked at what time it had happened. She told him at half-past seven exactly. “That’s very strange,” the soldier remarked, “for yesterday, while I was crossing from France, I looked at my watch, and, finding the time to be half-past seven, I said to myself. “I wonder what Mr. and Mrs.— will say when I drop them a call this time to-morrow evening.”
One might say that the whole underworld has been stirred to its depths and abysses.
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Many thanks for this!
It is very interesting to compare and contrast with respect to details it shares with the Introduction in the book. For one example, in the book the reference “the Pall Mall in a note about St. James says he is of the brotherhood of the Bowmen of Mons” is elliptical in comparison with what Machen writes here, including a reference to his Feast Day, 25 July (found also in the Book of Common Prayer not only in the calendar but with its own Collect and Epistle and Gospel Lessons).
Or, for a contrasting example, how brief the discussion of his Sunday morning “image” and its relation to the story of “The Soldier’s Rest” (which will turn out to be one of the additional three stories mentioned in the prefactory announcement). A striking difference here is the brevity of the reference to “the fierceness of the furnace of fire through which our men had passed”, without the specific detail given in the Introduction which clearly relates it to the third chapter of the Book of Daniel when he says “I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated”. It is probably worthwhile in this context to note that the Book of Common Prayer lists for the First Mattins Lesson on the Feast of All Saints “Wisdom 3 to v. 10” – and so including verses 6-8: “As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering. And in the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble. They shall judge the nations, and have dominion over the people, and their Lord shall reign for ever.”
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