Lo smarrimento di Machen per quanto sta accadendo è al livello più alto. Non sa capacitarsi di come quello che per lui era stata una fantasia anche troppo ardita venisse ormai ampiamente accettata non solo in ambienti esoterici e occulti ma anche avesse una diffusione pubblica.
Ormai corrono le voci più disparate: su di un campo di battaglia, riferiscono alcuni testimoni oculari, una nube si era interposta fra l'offensiva tedesca e la ritirata degli ingl
esi. Secondo altri testimoni la nube aveva nascosto i soldati inglesi alla vista delle truppe germaniche che avanzavano, rendendoli invisibili. Secondo altri ancora delle figure di luce erano apparse sul campo di battaglia impaurendo i cavalli dell'esercito germanico che inseguiva i soldati inglesi.
Il flusso è inarrestabile, la macchia si allarga a dismisura.
Il suo racconto non aveva fatto altro che condensare, rapprendere, unificare, fare da trait d'union per altre migliaia di exemplares di un sovrannaturale che manifesta se stesso in mille modi, dalla superstizione alla visione, alla leggenda, fino alla testimonianza.
Lo stesso Machen non si sente più in grado di comprendere la chiliogonica manifestazione di un'idea che lui medesimo aveva teorizzato in The White People nel 1904.
Se il chiliogono posso pensarlo perfettamente (una figura geometrica che ha mille lati) così altrettanto non posso rappresentarlo perfettamente nella fantasia perché man mano che i lati si moltiplicano, l'immaginazione si dilata, e nella loro raffigurazione se ne perde la distinzione.
Ma quello che forse Machen pensa gli sia sfuggito di mano in realtà è proprio quello che in modo molto teoretico aveva affermato nel racconto The White People: il male è positivo al pari del bene, solo che sta dall'altra parte, cioè da quella parte opposta alla tua, che non lo controlli più perché è andato nella direzione opposta a quella che volevi, a tal punto fuori del tuo controllo che ti si ritorce contro. E' la seconda caduta, per cui ripeti in questo mondo quella che fu la prima caduta originaria: “Il peccatore cerca di ottenere qualcosa che non fu mai suo. In breve, ripete la caduta” (“The sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.”- The Withe People)
THE BOWMEN
by Arthur Machen
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.
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.
