Making Supernatural Ecstasy—
How to Endure Unutterable Horror
Thomas Kent Miller
Shortly after England’s entry into The Great War on August 4th, 1914, as Arthur Machen authority Gwilym Games has said, “For the first time in seven or eight years, Machen felt himself impelled to write fiction again, noting this as a significant change [and then quoting Machen]: “A good many years ago I had written and even printed some little tales of the marvelous. But I had long ceased to practice the art, and it was with some sense of surprise that I found myself longing to write a story of the glory of Mons.” There followed the writing and publication of the short war story “The Bowmen” in the London Evening News the following month. Prior to this turning point, Machen had abstained from the task of writing fiction, mainly to focus on earning a living with a real job, namely his role as journalist since 1910 for the Evening News.
Nearly a year after “The Bowmen,” Machen wrote fourteen war stories during a period of 17 delineated months. The majority of these stories were written in his often-misunderstood style that I’ve called pseudo-journalism because he inserts his incontestably real journalist self into a 100% fictional story. Of these stories, eleven were clearly pseudo-journalism, the remaining three were crafted in a more standard third-person style. That 17-month period had a beginning and an end—from July 1915 through October 1916—even though the war would continue for another two years. Following the serialization of his novella, the pseudo-journalistic “The Great Terror,” and the subsequent publication of the longer novel version titled The Terror, he quit writing fiction for fifteen years (with only the rare exception for a friend), due to the untold stresses on his life at that time.
One of his better pseudo-journalism war stories is “The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton and What Happened to Him on the Somme,” which grievously had been lost and forgotten for almost a century. Stalwart literary investigator Gwilym Games unearthed it from the bowels of the Evening News archives sometime prior to 2011, at which time it and some similar material he’d found was published in the Friends of Arthur Machen Journal Faunus Number Twenty-Three. In this story, Machen downplayed his role as a journalist, the better to allow Sergt. Haughton’s transformation to shine through.
But it was the first day of July that the Battle of Somme began in earnest, inspiring Machen to write the touching “The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton and What Happened to Him on the Somme” published in two parts, on the 14th and 17th of July 1916 in the Evening News. The story tells of a fictional friend of Machen’s dying on the first day of the battle, yet transcending his own maiming and death to stroll into a heavily fortified German machine-gun nest, taking 150 prisoners, “and he saw them safe.”
Machen begins his tale with: “Extraordinary things are being told of the late Sergeant Richard Haughton of the Salford Rangers; of the last few days of his life and of his death.”
By the end of that one day—July 1—62,000 allied troops had become casualties, with a staggering 20,000 killed. According to the documentary producer Adam Sternburg, “More British soldiers died that day than on any other during World War I or on any other day in the history of British warfare . . . . once the enormity of the catastrophe sank in, the nation was consumed by grief.”
How soon after July 1, Machen began to write his story “The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton and What Happened to Him on the Somme” is not known. Nevertheless, it would have taken a few days for the facts of the devastation to become known to him. An excellent question, therefore, is: Was “The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton” produced before or after the facts of the battle reached Machen? Would he have changed anything about the story regardless of his awareness of the casualties? Recall that the story would be published two weeks after July 1, therefore he had time to edit and make any changes he needed.
No doubt, one the most moving aspects of the story must be the aura of transcendence that permeates the story from first sentence to last. Machen exercised his considerable skill to deaden the horror of the battle’s facts, and to make the absolutely impossible appear boldly in the guise of supernatural ecstasy.
The main passages that help spawn this transcendence within the story follow. Speaking is “the indisputable journalist Machen” who was inserted into the story by himself to better explain to the reader:
“Newspaper readers will be aware that the war correspondent struggles above all to be definite, clear as to his facts (when describing battles). He avoids vague generalities and flowery eloquence to the utmost, knowing that the one desire of his readers is to understand what has really happened, to be able to get some clear picture of the actualities of the battlefield . . . . [T]o his newspaper he looks for the hard actualities of the affair . . .
“Knowing all this, it was with a curious eye that I detected in the descriptions of the battle of the Somme something that broke through the calculated reserve of the correspondents. There are all the actualities; but there is something more. These witnesses confess, in spite of themselves, that they have seen things incredible and have mingled with immortals. They have been for a while in a world of supernatural ecstasy, in which agony has been joy, and destroying flames have blossomed into festal flowers, and death itself has become the supreme delight and rapture. By the Somme, on those low hills and in the shadow of those dark woods the common fashion of this world was changed; for a moment a hidden glory was manifested to the witnesses.”
“The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton and What Happened to Him on the Somme” is one of Machen’s better stories; its themes of rebirth, festal flowers, and rapture link it obviously to the author’s wonderful earlier “The Great Return,” which shares much of the same imagery and exaltation.
“The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton” is special for still another reason. It was crafted, not as short stories usually are at a table or desk with pencil, paper, typewriter or word processor, all within the confines of normal life—but in a hyper-charged, almost electric schizophrenic environment as the apprehensive residents of the home front pretended that all was normal while all the time knowing that their sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands were in mind-numbing jeopardy and likely never would return from the front. Machen would have had to write his story of rebirth and miracles within this fractured environment while navigating his own strained emotional life, while in real-time, at the same time, parallel with and concurrent with, not far away men were slaughtering other men by the thousands.
Thomas Kent Miller is the author of Mars in the Movies: A History (2016), the first ever movie overview book entirely about Mars films. His novels comprise a Victorian pastiche trilogy, including Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World (1987), The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life (2005) and The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time (2013). Miller has written for Ghosts & Scholars, a M. R. James Newsletter, Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, The Weird Tales Collector and other publications. Miller is a contributor to the Darkly Bright Critical Edition of The Terror.
Sources and Works Cited
Buchan, John. The Battle of Somme: A Never-Before-Seen Side of the Bloodiest Offensive of World War I – Viewed Through the Eyes of the Acclaimed War Correspondent. Musaicumbooks @okpublishing.info: Musaicum Books (Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting), 2017.
Games, Gwilym. “Making Up a Story in My Head: Machen’s Legends of the War.” In Faunus Number Twenty-Three, guest-edited by Gwilym Games, periodical edited by Mark Valentine and Ray Russell. London/Kildwick: Friends of Arthur Machen, Spring 2011.
Machen, Arthur. ‘The Bowmen.’ In The Bowmen and Other Legends of War. Wildside Press, 2005 (reprint of 1915 First Edition)
Machen, Arthur, ‘The Calvary of Azay.’ In Faunus Number Twenty-Three, guest-edited by Gwilym Games, periodical edited by Mark Valentine and Ray Russell. London/Kildwick: Friends of Arthur Machen, Spring 2011.
Machen, Arthur. ‘The Great Terror.’ In The Terror: A New Critical Edition of the Mythopoeic Classic. New Mexico: Darkly Bright Press, 2024.
Machen, Arthur, “The Story of Sergt. Richard Haughton.” In Faunus Number Twenty-Three, guest-edited by Gwilym Games, periodical edited by Mark Valentine and Ray Russell. London/Kildwick: Friends of Arthur Machen, Spring 2011.
Machen, Arthur. The Terror. In Tales of Horror and Supernatural. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2006.
Machen, Arthur. The Terror: A Fantasy. In The Terror: A New Critical Edition of the Mythopoeic Classic. New Mexico: Darkly Bright Press, 2024.
Miller, Thos. (Thomas) Kent. “Pseudo-Journalism in the Office of Irony: Arthur Machen’s 17-Month Passing Phase.” In Faunus Number Twenty-Four. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, Autumn 2011.
Philpott, William. Three Armies on the Somme. New York: Borzoi Books, a division of Alfred A. Knopf. http://www.aaknopf.com, 2009.
Sternberg, Adam. “The Somme: Storm of Steel.” In The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: The Complete Volume Two, The War Years. DVD documentary. Hollywood: Lucasfilm Ltd./Paramount/CBS, 2007.
darklybrightpress.com 