The Bowman

Andrais de Staic at the Pleasance launch this morning.

In a somewhat tangental way this brought to mind a short story by Arthur Machen called The Bowmen which is a good example of how fiction can be mistaken for reality. The story is about a company of English soldiers in the trenches of WW1, facing impossible odds. One man, calling for St George to help them suddenly beholds a vision of thousands of bowmen who advance towards the German lines firing their arrows. The German soldiers are found dead but with no wounds.

The story was not labelled as fiction when it was published in Londons Evening News and Machen had previously written factual accounts for the paper. Events at Mons had already been considered to be somewhat miraculous since the British were so outnumbered. And despite Machen's protestations that the tale was a fiction, somehow, in the telling and retelling of it, probably helped along by hysteria and propaganda, the fictional bowmen became the Angel of Mons.