“Why not? It’s a filthy night in so many respects. A little storytelling now might do us some good.”
The old writer began to speak in his deep, resonant voice about the beginning of his own life. Smith found himself drifting into a state that was nearer trance than wakefulness. Here he was, walking through London in the dead of night, body parts littering an otherwise empty street, the surviving occupants still taking refuge in their shelters. The sky above London burned a bloody red. And from all quarters of the ancient city sirens rose in a single note to signify the “all clear”, although it could equally have been the trumpets of angels calling newly released souls to heaven. Trying not to let the air of unreality settle too deeply into his bones, Smith concentrated on Machen’s words.
“‘… I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen on me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent.’ If you will excuse an author’s conceit, those words I’ve just recited are from my autobiography. And I still stand by them. On 3 March 1863 I was born into what seemed a magical borderland between this reality and others too fabulous for mortals to describe with any accuracy. I’m still far from adept at capturing the quiddity of the land I grew up in. A land of hills, deep lanes and dark woods aplenty. Of rivers that foamed red after rain. And peopled by men and women who spoke an ancient language that no Englishman could fathom. My father was rector there, and I grew up an only child, often with only my imagination as a companion. I roamed what, for me, is a faery land of ineffable mystery. It was littered with the romantic ruins of the Roman occupation. It was saturated to the very roots with Celtic myth. No wonder, then, that I grew into a young man with one burning ambition: to write! As soon as I could I left my native Wales for London. And there, as many a young man has done before me, I wrote beautifully incomprehensible literature in an attic room. I sustained my body on green tea, dry bread and tobacco. And all the time my mind blazed with stories — such incredible stories! Tales of mystery, gods and spirit worlds that would astonish the world of letters. Of course, publishers rejected them as the awfully conceited trumpery of an eager but inexperienced scribbler, such as I was in those days. And like so many young men who’d followed their star to Grub Street, I starved. Well… I managed to avoid the work house and death by malnutrition… by a whisker, I should add. I earned a meagre wage as by turns a teacher, cataloguer, publisher’s assistant. And step by step, inch by inch I began to earn my daily bread as a writer. And so I saw my strange compositions begin to appear in print, only to puzzle the great British public, I dare say. The Great God Pan, The Inmost Light, The Three Impostors… and many short stories and essays. If you disregard the piffling sums I received for my work you could almost describe it as a successful literary life. I found a home. I married, only to lose my wife, Amy, within twelve years to cancer. No angel was at hand then at her deathbed, you’ll note. At least none that I saw. In order to try and cope with bereavement I changed careers. At the age of thirty-seven, in 1900, I became an actor with the Benson company. Marvellous times. Forget what they say about schooldays — those were the happiest of my life, treading the boards. Did you know I even starred in a silent picture? Good grief, me! Can you believe such a thing? Ah… then by the end of the decade I’d retired, gracefully I hope, from a life of acting, to earn my daily bread with the pen once more. I’d also rather fortuitously acquired a second wife along the way. She’s at home at Amersham at the moment. Safe, I hope, bearing in mind this little outbreak of hellfire tonight.” Machen indicated bombed buildings with his unlit pipe. Flames still licked at exposed timbers. At the end of the street men directed water hoses onto a burning post office. “Now where was I? Uhm… ah, yes, back to the quarry face of literature. From the heaven of greasepaint and make-believe to my own personal hell — becoming a reporter on the London Evening News. Lieutenant, I’d dreamt of weaving tales of magic and awe only to find myself sitting at my desk in the journalists’ cattle shed of an office, writing interminable copy concerning the rich and famous of London society. My given quests? To learn whether the Duke of Richmond favoured flannels over tweed that particular season, or whether it was fashionable for the daughters of admirals to devour their pate on toast or wafer, or to discover the name of Lady Such-and-such’s favorite poodle. It was deadly dull work; my family straddled the line between being merely hard-up and actually poverty-stricken. There you have it, the needs of providing for my family — poor though it was — made a prisoner of me in a newspaper office. A job, you will have surmised, that I hated with absolute passion.”
“You still wrote fiction?”
“Yes, there were still short stories and literary sketches for magazines.”
“Then the war. The Great War.”
“Yes, lieutenant. The Great War. My age required me to view the battles in Europe from afar. And I was still a slave of the press galley. However, I saw that for the first time my talent, what there was of it, might have a greater purpose than I first supposed. Those first months of the war were bad ones for Britain. Food ran short, tens of thousands of our soldiers were killed, towns and villages alike grieved for the loss of their young men, we were in constant retreat as the Germans scored victory after victory. People from the lowest classes to the aristocracy were considering the awful possibility that we might lose the war, and that the Kaiser would claim the British Empire for himself. It seemed to me that although I could never fire a rifle in anger, I might help alleviate this pervading air of despondency. With my editor’s blessing I began to write short articles in praise of the British way of life, in studies of how ordinary men and women went about their work. I strove to illuminate the working folks’ innate sense of honesty and goodness. As well as the factual articles I contributed short squibs of fiction to the newspaper, intended to warm the patriot’s heart and perhaps raise the spirits of the reader, at least for a few moments.”
“Then came ‘The Bowmen’?”
“Yes, sir, then along came ‘The Bowmen’.” Despite his age, the old man moved effortlessly through the darkened streets. Stepping over rubble, or sidestepping a bloodied human limb, did not interrupt his faultless discourse. “My story ‘The Bowmen’ wasn’t a great work of literature that had been maturing inside me. Far from it! The tale suggested itself to me on the last Sunday of August, 1914. Before going to church I — like my countrymen — had been reading press reports of terrible calamity on the battle fields of Europe. Our army was in retreat. The Germans were close to breaking through our lines before racing to capture the Channel ports. In short, it looked as if the British nation was doomed. During the singing of the Gospel by the deacon in church I, unbidden, found myself imagining the British Army embroiled in a furnace of torment, agony and death. In the midst of this our brave fighting men were consumed by the flame, yet aureoled in it; they were scattered like ashes and yet triumphant; they were martyred yet forever glorious. I saw our men with a shining about them. And this vision, I suppose you could call it, formed the basis of the story ‘The Soldier’s Rest’, which is a far better work than ‘The Bowmen’. Incidentally, I did write ‘The Bowmen’, despite rumours you might have heard to the contrary that I had secret knowledge of an actual event, or that the manuscript of the completed story was delivered to me by ‘a lady-in-waiting’ and that I simply added my name beneath the title in an act of literary piracy! No, I penned a tale that, although mediocre in execution, I hoped would at least moderate the misery of a small percentage of our people who were living in such unhappiness and fear. And so the story appeared in the Evening News of 29 September 1914. I apologize for making its genesis appear such a profound event. It wasn’t; it was merely a short tale about British soldiers being saved by the ghostly archers of Agincourt. As it appeared in an evening newspaper, I believed it would be forgotten by the time the following morning’s paper arrived on the public’s doormat. However, a month or two later, I received requests from the editors of a number of parish magazines to reprint the tale. As I did not own the copyright of ‘The Bowmen’, my editor agreed. I wasn’t unhappy. If readers’ hearts were lifted by my work then all well and good. However, when letters began to arrive at the office with requests to reprint the story as a pamphlet — together with a plea that I write an introduction, citing the source of my material, giving dates and names of witnesses of the miraculous event — I found myself in very peculiar territory indeed. In short, within the space of a few months, rational men and women the length of Britain — perhaps even the Empire — believed that ‘The Bowmen’ was not a work of fiction at all, but a newspaper report containing nothing but hard fact. In retrospect, I understand that my story delivered a powerful morale boost to the nation. But at the time it turned my life into a nightmare. When I replied to countless hopeful letters that my story was ‘made up’, I was greeted with disbelief. People had read the story in a newspaper so it must be true; that’s how the logic ran. And when I insisted ‘The Bowmen’ was fiction, that it contained not a shred of fact, that was when men and women turned on me as viciously as starving dogs. I was spat upon in the street, threatened with a beating in bars. My wife was pushed to the ground in our own garden when a priest, who’d called to remonstrate with me, didn’t believe that I was not at home. And then another miracle occurred: the miracle of mass self-delusion. When it seemed that I had the upper hand — when at last I began to build an argument that ‘The Bowmen’ was a piece of fiction — some very senior churchmen launched a counter-argument. They conceded that while ‘The Bowmen’ was intended as fiction, I had, in fact, experienced a God-given vision of a genuine miracle: the rescue of our troops on the battlefield by some immortal agency. Moreover, the churchmen claimed I was so conceited, so consumed by greed that I’d passed this wonderful vision off as my own work, whereby I could benefit from the fame it would bring me and become monstrously rich! The public accepted the churchmen’s argument. I was seen as something lower than a swindler and blackmailer.”