Soldiers were dwarfed by the modern machinery of war on the battlefields of the First World War, and prayed for deliverance. This is a public domain reading of Arthur Machen's classic story from the heat of battle, "The Bowmen". I enhanced it, removed reverb and added a musical intro with effects.
00:00Soldiers were dwarfed by a modern machinery of war, on the battlefields of the First World War.
00:06When feelings of insignificance overcame them, they prayed for deliverance.
00:11Now, on HistoryRadio.org, Arthur Maycomb's classic story from the heat of battle.
00:19The Bowman
00:30The Bowman
01:00The Bowman
01:30It was during the retreat of the 80,000, and the authority of the censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit.
01:38But 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,
01:47and without any certain news the hearts of men felled within them and grew faint,
01:53as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.
01:57On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company,
02:07there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger,
02:13not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation.
02:18With the permission of the censorship and of the military expert, this corner may perhaps be described as a salient,
02:24and 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.
02:35All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it.
02:44The 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.
02:52But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother,
02:58and as the heat of the day increased, so did the fury of that terrific cannonade.
03:03There was no help, it seemed.
03:06The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it.
03:10It was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
03:14There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
03:18It is at its worst, it can blow no harder, and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it.
03:26So it was in these British trenches.
03:29There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men,
03:32But even they were appalled, as this seven times heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them,
03:39And overwhelmed them, and destroyed them.
03:42And at this very moment, they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines.
03:49Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see,
03:53The German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column,
03:57A grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.
04:02There was no hope at all.
04:05They shook hands, some of them.
04:07One man improvised a new version of the battle song,
04:10Goodbye, goodbye to Tipperary, ending with,
04:14And we shan't get there.
04:15And they all went on firing steadily.
04:19The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again.
04:26The Germans dropped line after line.
04:29The Tipperary humorist asked,
04:31What price Sydney Street?
04:33And the few machine guns did their best.
04:36But everybody knew it was of no use.
04:38The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions,
04:42As others came on, and on, and on,
04:45And they swarmed and stirred, and advanced from beyond and beyond.
04:50World without end, amen, said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance,
04:56As he took aim and fired.
04:58And then he remembered,
05:00He says he cannot think why or wherefore,
05:03A queer vegetarian restaurant in London,
05:05Where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak.
05:13On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue,
05:18With the motto,
05:19Ad sit anglis sanctus georgias.
05:22May St. George be a present help to the English.
05:25This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things,
05:29And now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass,
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