The Angels of Mons

MP3 Audio CD. The Angels of Mons

The Bowmen

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of
the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But
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;
and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them
and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had
entered into their souls.

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms
with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little
English company, there was one point above all other points in our
battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat,
but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and
of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a
salient, and 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.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against
this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The
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. But the
shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and
tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did
the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The
English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it
was being steadily battered into scrap iron.