1
When the Allied armies achieved the break-through at Saint Lo some few years ago in that war we call Second, our armored columns fanned out over the Brittany peninsula and thrust deep into the river valleys of France. Most of us watched the drive for Paris, shook our heads over that nasty business at Avranches, and breathed more freely when Paris fell. From then on it was largely a matter of following, as closely as the security blackout permitted, Patton’s progress toward the Rhine and the star-shaped forts at Metz.
Few of us were then aware of the column under Hodges that began first to probe, then to thrust northward into Belgium. At the time it was briefly noted that our push to the Belgian border was even more rapid than the German drive southward in 1940. And so our entry into and beyond Mons passed almost unnoticed. Even the Germans were not too well aware of it, apparently, for it was outside Mons, you will recall, that German tanks were waved on by American MPs and obligingly clanked into bivouac areas with the General Shermans and the half-tracks of the American First Army.
There were, if I remember correctly, and I am sure that I do, one or two references to the Angel of Mons incident of the last war, but these were merely notes in passing. The mere mention of Mons meant Machen to me, and I suppose that, like many another Machenite, I waited with something like bated breath for a sign of some sort, or a sequel to the legend that had been born just thirty years ago that very month of September.
And, I suppose, devout Machenites the world over re-read in that September of 1944, the invented tale of the wonderful Welshman, the tale that was at first called simply, The Bowmen and which came to be called, by popular demand, The Angels of Mons.
It was one of the strangest stories of that first World War and a story pure and simple it was. But it so captured and fired the imagination of all Englishmen, and of the world, that people were unwilling for it to remain merely a magical tale by a Welshman writing strange tales in the city of London. People must have their miracles, and so Machen’s invention of the Bowmen became one of the hallowed legends of the war. You may remember the story, for you must have heard it, in one version or another, even if you had never even heard of Arthur Machen.
It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, the tale begins. The English were in danger of annihilation. At a particularly important point in the line the German guns had thundered and shrieked all morning. Finally, their numbers greatly reduced, the English saw a tremendous host moving against them. German infantry—as far as the eye could see. Well—the English fought on. One of the riflemen, who happened to know Latin and other useless things, recalled a motto he had once seen in a restaurant, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius, which motto he said, uttered or shouted. As he did so he felt “something between a shudder and a shock” and behold! the roar of battle died down to a gentle murmur and a great voice and a shout louder than the thunder cried, “Array, Array, Array!” This was followed by other battlecries in English and in French—cries to Saint George. And then he saw, “beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow,” and their arrows flew toward the German host. Who, as it happened, were stopped in their tracks.
Now this invention served its purpose, no less than any inspirational tale or legend or truth or half-truth. But it became a matter of great controversy because, as it happened, Arthur Machen, when questioned about it, blithely revealed that there was not an ounce of truth in it. The story was pure invention, a piece of fiction which was not, he added, entirely to his satisfaction as a writer.
This discrediting of a miracle soon got abroad, and there was a great hue and cry and indeed a notable hullabaloo about the matter. Machen was taken to task ... the clergy thundered against him and many a pulpit was pounded by many a pudgy ecclesiastical fist. Gentle ladies began to produce “evidence” that the event had actually taken place—that they had had it from a soldier who was there. A great many witnesses, once or twice removed, were found and quoted. The controversy grew and with it the legend.
As for Machen, he finally wrote a preface to a new American edition to The Bowmen, now called The Angels of Mons, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1915. In it he wrote:
“This was in last August, or to be more precise, in the last Sunday of last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday morning between meat and mass. It was in the Weekly Dispatch that I saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect the details, but I have not forgotten the impression that was then made in my mind. I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and forever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the Deacon was singing the Gospel.” Well—that is the genesis of The Bowmen or, if you insist, The Angels of Mons.
It was murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters, Machen says, that before he wrote the tale he had “heard something.” The most decorative of these whisperings was this: “I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting.” And, presumably, as is the custom with all popular legends, most everyone had a cousin or a brother-in-law who had been there. By the time the story had been reprinted in parish periodicals and spread by word of pulpit, it began to seem to Machen that he had failed in the art of letters. There began to be variations on the theme—such as one in which the German dead were found to be punctured with arrow wounds. The occultists next had a go at it, then the scientists began to talk learnedly of “mass hallucination.”
The legend was then translated into several languages including, at any rate, the French. The shining figure of St. George became, variously, St. Michael the Archangel and St. Joan of Arc. The Germans, for security reasons no doubt, offered no opinion or explanation of their abrupt halt or of the tale. However, as Machen observes, “Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will be noted, has disappeared—he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants—and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
“In The Bowmen my imagined soldier saw ‘a long line of shapes, with a shining about them.’ And Mr. A. P. Sinnett, writing in the May (1915) issue of The Occult Review, reporting what he had heard, states that ‘those who could see said they saw ‘a row of shining beings’ between the two armies.’ Now I conjecture that the word ‘shining’ is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels and nothing else, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become ‘the Angels of Mons.’ In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.”
Pamphlets were published, as is usual in such cases. The Theosophists published an “answer to Mr. Arthur Machen.” Another worker in the field collected “numerous Confirmations, Testimonies, Evidences of the Wounded” and other materials in an “authentic record” of the event. The furore died out after the war and the Angels of Mons rested in legend with only sporadic appearances in the pages of the Sunday supplements. Within a few years the legend had graduated to the sphere of science or pseudo-scientific study.
2
In 1930 there was published in London a book called The Mystery and Lore of Apparitions, with Some Account of Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms and Boggerts in Early Times by Harold Shaylor, an investigator in various fields of the marvelous.
The Frontispiece of this comfortably plump volume is “from a Drawing by A. Forestier, reproduced by kind permission from the Illustrated London News.” The sketch shows eight or nine soldiers in a trench in the foreground firing at advancing hordes of Germans. To the right and standing above the parapet of the trench are three gigantic bowmen, helmeted and with swords at their sides, launching arrows (visible in the sketch) at the Germans. A fourth bow and part of an arm are visible at the extreme right. The Germans are falling in great numbers, at least one is visibly pierced by an arrow.
Within the book, among the many marvels, we find this:
“Considerable discussion took place in the Press during the autumn of 1914 and the early part of 1915, with respect to the phenomena said to have been seen at the Battle of Mons.
“The publications of these stories brought forth many others of a similar character, the veracity of which appears to be unquestioned, and it will be found interesting to compare them with some of the accounts of phantom armies told in the preceding pages” (of Mr. Shaylor’s collection).
There follows then a story told by a non-commissioned officer who was in the retreat from Mons on or about August 28th, 1914. The weather was hot and clear and, between eight and nine in the evening, this officer was with a group of others on guard duty. An officer came up and asked if they had seen anything “startling.” Two men were sent forward to see if they could discover what the officer meant. They returned with nothing untoward to report. The officer then came back and, “taking me and some others a few yards away, showed us the sky. I could see quite plainly in mid-air,” says the non-commissioned officer, “a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighborhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the center having what looked like outspread wings, the other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the center one. They appeared to have a long, loose, hanging garment of a golden tint and they were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour. All the men with me saw them, and other men came up from groups who also told us they had seen the same thing. I remember the day, because it was a day of terrible anxiety for us. Later on the Uhlans attacked us and we drove them back with heavy losses. It was after this engagement, when we were dog-tired, that the vision appeared to us.”
Thus the story of the non-commissioned officer as told to Mr. Thompson. Another account of spectral figures is recounted by a private of the Lancashire Fusiliers. He is supposed to have given an account of his experience to a Sister in a hospital. “It’s true, Sister, we all saw it. First there was a sort of yellow mist like, sort of rising before the Germans as they came to the top of the hill. Come on like a solid wall they did. The next minute comes this funny cloud of light and when it clears off, there’s a tall man with yellow hair in golden armour, on a white horse, holding up his sword and his mouth open. The men knew it was St. George. Hadn’t they seen him with his sword on every ‘quid’ they’d ever seen?”
Thus the Lancashire Fusilier in Mr. Thompson’s 1930 account. Machen encountered him just as the Putnam edition was on the presses in 1915. In a Postscript to that edition of The Bowmen, Machen refers to an article called The Angelic Leaders written by a Miss Phyllis Campbell. Miss Campbell relates that she was a nurse in France where there came into her care a Lancashire Fusilier (the same one presumably, mentioned by Thompson). He said he had seen St. George on a white horse, leading the British at Vitry-le-Francaise, when the Allies turned. His story was corroborated by a wounded R.F.A. man who was present. The R.F.A. man said he saw a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open (as if, comments Machen, he was saying, “Come on, boys! I’ll put the kybosh on the devils!”) This figure was bareheaded and the R.F.A. man and the Fusilier knew that he was St. George, because he was exactly like the figure of St. George on the sovereigns. “Hadn’t they seen him with his sword on every ‘quid’ they’d ever had?”
The difference between having a quid and seeing one may be significant. At any rate, Machen makes a rather telling point concerning his Lancashire Fusilier. The soldiers are said to have known it was St. George by his exact likeness to the figure on the sovereign. This strikes Machen as being odd because the apparition is described as being bareheaded and in armour while the St. George on the sovereign or quid is just the reverse, since he is quite naked except for a short cape flying from the shoulders and a helmet. So—the evidence of the quid they’d either had or seen scarcely presents sufficient identification of the saint.
A final vision is presented in C. J. Thompson’s book—this one by a soldier in an artillery battery in a letter dated June 26th, 1915. He describes a being like an angel with outstretched wings surrounded by a luminous cloud which appeared between the advancing Germans and the British. The artillery man further states, “with regard to the stories which you have heard about angels and spirits, they may be right but of course you must remember that trench work is mind-straining as well as nerve-racking and that may account for a lot of these stories.”
And indeed, Mr. Thompson ascribes most of these visitations, visions and miracles to nerve strain or mass hallucination.
It will be noted that the legend had, by this time, divorced itself completely from its creator. Mr. Thompson makes no mention of Arthur Machen, either as the reporter or creator of this astonishing event. Nor do Thompson’s Acknowledgments or Index contain any mention of Machen, Arthur; or of his published works. Of course the tale of The Bowmen was first published in a newspaper, the London Evening News for September 29, 1914, for which paper Machen was then a reporter. Mr. Machen may have been included in Mr. Thompson’s inclusive word “Press.”
3
However, the curious turnings and twistings of legend are not yet finished. The miracles of 1915 became the mass hallucinations of 1930, and the creator of the slight story of The Bowmen had been quite forgotten in the furore attending each of them. But by far the most curious circumstance in the whole curious affair is contained in the most recent, to my knowledge, mention of the Mons legend. It occurs in an article by Meyer Berger, entitled Legends of the War, published in Harper’s Bazaar in January, 1944.
Mr. Berger is an extremely competent correspondent for the New York Times. As a matter of fact, it was out of respect for Mr. Berger’s worth as a correspondent that I saved from salvage the magazine in which his article appeared. Early in the spring of 1944 I was cleaning out the winter’s accumulation of magazines and newspapers and readying them for the next paper pick-up. The baroque Bazaar is not, usually, to my taste, but seeing Berger’s name over an article I placed the magazine to one side and took it up to read some nights later.
The article concerns legends of the war. Mr. Berger remarks, sensibly, that war nurtures in the soldier some dormant sense that opens the door to superstition, to mysticism, and to visions of the supernatural. He then outlines the various legends of the White Lady on various fronts, the Christ in Flanders legend and, of course, the Angel of Mons. Mr. Berger uses the singular, and so one supposes, there is an Angel of Mons legend as well.
Mr. Berger outlines the legend briefly, explaining that there was no earthly reason for the Jerries to have stopped the pursuit, but stop they did—and the wherefore of this astonishing halt forms the basis for the story.
“Arthur Machen said later,” continues the Berger article, “that he conceived the legend of the Angel of Mons as he daydreamed in church over the news of the German’s miraculous halt.” This is not quite what Machen said, of course. Machen explained that he conceived the story of the Bowmen as he brooded in church over the news of the British retreat. Berger goes on to relate that when Machen’s story appeared in the London Evening News as fiction it was, to his (Machen’s) astonishment, taken up and spread all over the world as something that actually happened. “There is no reason,” remarks Berger, “to question his explanation.”
On the other hand Berger spoke in France with Tommies who swore that, Machen or no Machen, they saw the Angel at Mons, though not as he described it in his piece. “The Machen story said that when the British were hardest pressed at Mons, there appeared in the heavens, above the battlefield, an unusual cloud formation. This changed into a giant likeness of St. George, flanked by rows of medieval English bowmen whose flights of arrows killed virtually all the German horde. When the bodies were examined there was no sign of a wound.”
Whatever this may be, it is not the Machen story. Machen has no cloud, no giant St. George ... only “a long line of shapes with a shining about them.” Mr. Berger also talked with a Sergeant Coombs of the King’s Royal Rifles at an English base hospital in Trouville. Coombs swore he had seen the Angel of Mons and Berger had reason to believe him, “if only because he wore the Mons Star.” Coombs describes “a kind of triple cloud” ... a large center cloud with two clouds at either side. They had no particular shape at first but they gradually became a great angel ... “the two smaller clouds were enormous wings, and the angel spread its wings as if it were signalling the jerries to stop where they were.”
This seraphic semaphore is a refinement that had not previously appeared in any of the many versions of the legend. One of the legend’s variations, writes Berger, “has a faintly humorous side.” It appeared in the North American Review in August, 1915.
“It told of a soldier, hard-pressed with the rest at Mons and ready to drop, who found himself murmuring, ‘Adest Anglis Sanctus Georgius.’ He knew no Latin and he didn’t know what moved him to the utterance. Even as it came to his lips, he recalled that he had seen it lettered on a plate in a vegetarian restaurant in London, before he was called up to service. It means, roughly, ‘May St. George be a present help to England.’ Something like an electric shock convulsed the soldier and his shock-packed ears dimly heard men around him shouting, ‘St. George for Merrie England.’ From that point, the story followed the Machen pattern—archers appeared in the sky and the Germans dropped by thousands.”
Now this version, with the “faintly humorous side,” which appeared according to Mr. Berger in the North American Review in August, 1915, is the Machen story. Whether or not the North American Review version was written by Machen I have been unable to discover. There are differences, of course, even in the very condensed portion offered by Berger. The North American’s soldier knew no Latin ... he merely recited, incorrectly at that, and at a very propitious moment, a motto he had seen in a vegetarian restaurant. Machen’s soldier, although he had apparently patronized that very same vegetarian restaurant, did know Latin “and other useless things.”
And so the legend of the legend of the Angel or Angels of Mons continues to grow out of Arthur Machen’s tale of The Bowmen.
4
In 1915, possibly because he was then writing Far Off Things and was in a mood reminiscent, Arthur Machen declared that he had failed in the art of literature. Most good writers have felt, at one time or another, a similar sense of failure—or at least of mild frustration. Presumably they have a particular instance in mind, certainly Machen had his. It was simply because his tale of the Bowmen had been accepted as truth.
Now it may seem to many a triumph of art that one’s work is held to be so life-like and so real that it is generally accepted as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Our realists, for example, are said to feel that way. They consider the verdict of veracity the highest critical success. They have mirrored life and that, so help them, was what they had set out to do!
Machen felt differently about it. His invention, his creation, was not only accepted as being true, but his inventiveness and creativeness were denied him. His magic had been judged mere journalism and that, to Machen, or to any other creative artist, meant failure. However this may be, Machen did not fail in his other legends of the war. Possibly because he called some of them legends—perhaps because the public felt their “willing suspension of disbelief” already supported too great a load—at any rate Machen’s further inventions were permitted to remain inventions and he was accorded a considerable, if not fanatical, amount of praise.
These other tales, The Soldier’s Rest, The Monstrance, The Dazzling Light, had in them the very elements that should have appealed to those who make legends of inventions. They offered much in the way of tradition blended with mysticism, a mixture that should have drawn credence from a much less tradition-loving people than the British. Perhaps there was too much mysticism in these tales—anything less subtle than a warrior saint might not appeal to the Church Militant.
But surely Drake’s Drum, or the tale called Munitions of War had the stuff of legend in them, and tradition too. Layed on, as a matter of fact, with the trowel. Drake’s Drum should have become one of the glorious legends of the sea-girt Britons, the race of mariners. This is the tale that relates the events that took place off Scapa Flow, when the British Navy awaited the German High Fleet in November, 1918 to accept their surrender. There were rumours that the Germans might possibly fight and the crews of the British ships stood at “Battle Stations.” Then, as the first German ship appeared through the mist, a drum began to beat in the “Royal Oak.” And it beat and it rolled from then until the entire German Fleet was encircled and helpless. Of course the unauthorized drumming was investigated, but with all hands at Battle Stations, and especially upon such a momentous occasion, it was hardly possible, and highly improper, that there might be anyone aboard ship with the time and the inclination to beat a drum. However, neither drum nor drummer were located and there was no choice but to believe that what everyone had been hearing was Drake’s Drum—“the audible manifestation of the spirit of the Great Sea Captain, present at this hour of tremendous victory of Britain on the Sea.”
Now this is certainly a tale that should have appealed to the Britons, as indeed it did, but they refused to raise it to the status of a legend. Then too, the story appeared in 1919, by which time England had less urgent need of legends. In any case, the perfidious Teutons had by that time scuttled their ships at Scapa Flow.
Munitions of War, a story published in 1915, also has the stuff of legend, but somehow it never caught, never quite made the grade. Oh, it was successful enough as a story, but it never became a legend. Which, on the whole, pleased its creator. It tells of a traveller who went to a seaport in the West of England and how he was awakened in the night to hear vast oaths and burly voices heaving and ho-ing as they loaded ships. The language used by these stevedores had an other-century quality and the watcher in the night could only conclude that these men had loaded Nelson’s ships before Trafalgar. Had this story been written in 1942 or 1943 instead of 1915 it might have been printed in the “Welders and Steam-Fitters Gazette,” or some other house organ, and it may even have been legendized by England’s defense workers and winners of the coveted “E” award—or its British equivalent.
5
One of the longest, and by far the best, of Machen’s stories of the war period is one that made no appeal whatever to the legend-loving instincts of a people at war but which contained, as we may see in this post-war year of ’48, something of the nature of prophecy.
The Terror was first published in 1917. It was obviously inspired by the reception accorded the tale of the Bowmen combined with more of Machen’s creative magic. In the opening chapter Machen refers to the rumours and legends current in the early years of the war—the Bowmen, and the Russians who traveled through Britain by night on their way to some great push or other. These absurdities, Machen points out, depended upon the newspaper for their dissemination. The events described in The Terror had been held in strictest secrecy and no word had been given to the Press. For reasons of security all events connected with the Terror had been hushed up.
However, continued Machen, in a “now-it-can-be-told manner,” these were the reasons why “almost two years of war had been completed before the motionless English line began to stir.” The story of the Terror is, then, purported to be the secret of the long inactivity of the British Army.
Things were happening all over England ... very strange things. An airman had been killed under mysterious circumstances. The circumstances appeared to have been obvious enough—he seemed to have been attacked by a flock of birds, a rather mysterious matter in itself. There were other happenings here and there, and rumors of many more. After a few strange events had been reported in local papers there were no further accounts, and sometimes there was no local paper thereafter. Few people would have connected these events in any case. An airman is killed. A child chases a butterfly and is seen alive no more. There are strange stories about munitions works and fiery clouds and bees and horses and dogs. But none of these may be written up in the papers.
Well, at long last and with Machen’s usual circumambience and magic the story reveals that the mysterious deaths and strange events are being caused by animals—by cows and sheep and dogs and horses and bees and birds and moths. The explanation? Machen writes—
“... The source of the great revolt of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. I believe that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man has dominated beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned over the rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality that men possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And while he maintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that between him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There was supremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other.... ‘Spiritual’ signifies the royal prerogative of man, differentiating him from the beast. For long ages he had been putting off this royal robe ... he had declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that he is not Orpheus but Caliban. But the beasts ... perceived that the throne was vacant—not even friendship was possible between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed.”
But before these mysteries are resolved there is much talk of German spies, of mysterious rays, of all sorts of things that attempt to link the chain of horrors with the Germans. And in the course of these attempts to implicate the Germans in the Terror, Machen creates several hypotheses which seemed the very stuff of fiction in 1917—but which in our time must seem like prophecy.
It was in 1944 that the Viking Press issued a volume of its Portable Library devoted to Six Novels of the Supernatural. Machen’s tale of The Terror was one of the six. Thus it happens that I re-read The Terror at about the time our forces were capturing the platforms from which the robot bombs were launched at London. Now The Terror has always pleased me as a tale, a diversion and, as with most of Machen’s magic, something to think about when the world is quiet and mysterious—say a midnight in October, or three o’clock of an August afternoon. Nothing is inconceivable at such times, I think, and anything can happen—or seem to happen. A long, long look at a tree or a hedge or a hillside might give rise to disturbing thoughts—and one often finds oneself looking hastily away before something actually does happen.
But to return to The Terror. I had read it several times before and I thought I knew it quite well. But reading it in 1944 it seemed quite new. I had not remembered some things, perhaps because they seemed only incidental to the plot. They were the sort of thing one skipped over rapidly to see what would happen next, or when and where the Terror would strike again.
Well along into the story a Mr. Merrit, one of Machen’s more talkative characters, is explaining to a group of friends that “the Terror” is all part of a German plot, that there are, indeed, Germans established in England who are doing these things. And this, according to Merrit, is how it was done:
“The scheme had been prepared years before, some thought soon after the Franco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England presented very great difficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the inner military and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion in these quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England would involve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in a position of the tertius gaudens. This was the state of affairs when a very high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor, Huvelius.”
Professor Huvelius, according to Merrit (or Machen) was an extraordinary man. He was personally an amiable individual who gave every penny he owned to the poor, who dissipated his salary on charity and kindness. He starved himself in order to help the needy. And he wrote a book called De Facinore Humane, which book proved the infinite corruption of the human race.
The amiable Professor preached a cynical philosophy, the main tenets of which have a familiar sound. He held that human misery was due, by and large, to the mistaken notion that man was naturally well-disposed and kindly. Murderers, thieves and other abominable creatures are created by the false pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. And he goes on to say that kings and the rulers of people could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast extent by acting on the doctrine of human wickedness.
“War,” says the mild Professor, “which is one of the worst of evils, will always continue to exist. But a wise king will desire a brief rather than a lengthy war, a short evil rather than a long evil. And this not from the benignity of his heart towards his enemies, for we have seen that the human heart is naturally malignant, but because he desires to conquer, and to conquer easily, without a great expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing that if he can accomplish this feat his people will love him and his crown will be secure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, and not only spare his own nation, but the nation of the enemy, since in a short war the loss is less on both sides than in a long war. And so from evil will come good.”
This philosophy sounds more and more familiar as Merrit goes on to expound what he knows of the works of “Professor Huvelius.” The wise ruler will assume that the enemy is infinitely corruptible and infinitely stupid, since all men are so. The ruler then makes friends in the very council of his enemy and among the people of his enemy, bribing the wealthy and offering opportunity for still greater wealth, and winning the poor by swelling words. “For,” says the Professor, “it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth, while the people can be gained by talking to them of liberty, their unknown god.”
At any rate, this Huvelius sold his plan to the Germans. His philosophy too, apparently, and presumably he donated the moneys thus obtained to his favorite charity. The Germans accordingly proceeded to buy lands in certain suitable places in England, secret excavations were made and in a short time there was a subterranean Germany in the heart of England. The Germans, having made themselves as secure as Crusoes, waited for “the Day.”
This, then, was the plot outlined by Machen as he carefully prepared the background for his story. It seemed not too incredible in 1915 as he worked on the book, for there were rumors even then of emplacements ready for guns discovered by British troops in Belgium and in France, and certain caves along the Aisne seemed to have been made ready for cannon.
Now all this imagining in 1915 and 1917 comes pretty close to the events of 1940. Whether the Germans had read Huvelius or Machen in the years of the Long Armistice, or confined their reading to Mein Kampf, which seems the more likely, they had certainly covered the ground from Eben Emael to Quisling.
At any rate, The Terror is first rate reading at any time, and certainly a Machen “must.” It is too lengthy to be included in the usual bibliography—but it is readily available in Viking’s “Six Novels of the Supernatural.”