Winged Earth Magazine

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
"It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British
trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of
these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated
hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and
destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches
that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of
the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German
infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey
world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man
improvised a new version of the battlesong, "Good-bye, good-bye to
Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there". And they all went
on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity
for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans
dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, "What price
Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody
knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and
battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and
stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.

"World without end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some
irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered-he says
he cannot think why or wherefore--a queer vegetarian restaurant in
London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets
made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates
in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue,
with the motto, _Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius_--May St. George be a
present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and
other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey
advancing mass--300 yards away--he uttered the pious vegetarian
motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had
to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out
as he did so that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly
to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.

For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something
between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The
roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead
of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a
thunder-peal crying, "Array, array, array!"

His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him,
as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons.
He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "St. George! St.
George!"

"Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!"

"St. George for merry England!"

"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us."

"Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow."

"Heaven's Knight, aid us!"

And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the
trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were
like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of
arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German
hosts.

The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no
hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.
Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English,
"Gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're
blooming marvels! Look at those grey... gentlemen, look at them! D'ye
see them? They're not going down in dozens, nor in 'undreds; it's
thousands, it is. Look! look! there's a regiment gone while I'm
talking to ye."

"Shut it!" the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, "what are ye
gassing about!"

But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the
grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the
guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers
as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the
earth.

All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: "Harow! Harow!
Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!"

"High Chevalier, defend us!"

The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air;
the heathen horde melted from before them.

"More machine guns!" Bill yelled to Tom.

"Don't hear them," Tom yelled back. "But, thank God, anyway; they've
got it in the neck."

In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that
salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In
Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General
Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells
containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were
discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who
knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also
that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.