d so
to begin at the beginning.

This was in last August, to be more precise, on 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 on
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
for ever 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.

This was not the tale of "The Bowmen". It was the first sketch, as it
were, of "The Soldiers' Rest". I only wish I had been able to write it
as I conceived it. The tale as it stands is, I think, a far better
piece of craft than "The Bowmen", but the tale that came to me as the
blue incense floated above the Gospel Book on the desk between the
tapers: that indeed was a noble story--like all the stories that never
get written. I conceived the dead men coming up through the flames and
in the flames, and being welcomed in the Eternal Tavern with songs and
flowing cups and everlasting mirth. But every man is the child of his
age, however much he may hate it; and our popular religion has long
determined that jollity is wicked. As far as I can make out modern
Protestantism believes that Heaven is something like Evensong in an
English cathedral, the service by Stainer and the Dean preaching. For
those opposed to dogma of any kind--even the mildest--I suppose it is
held that a Course of Ethical Lectures will be arranged.

Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church,
considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place
than the average tavern; still, as I say, one's age masters one, and
clouds and bewilders the intelligence, and the real story of "The
Soldiers' Rest", with its "sonus epulantium in aeterno convivio", was
ruined at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the
actual story got written. And in the meantime the plot of "The Bowmen"
occurred to me. Now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and
whispered in all so