1: Sacred and Profane Geese

2: An Aylward Rises to the Challenge

3: Wrestling with the Ballad

4: Transmigration of the Wild Geese

5: The Bowmen considered as a Celtic Chain Letter

6: Vegetarianism, Sacrifice and Saint George

7: Embracing the Cottingley Fairies and Translating Houdini's Mother

8: What Light Through Roger Casement Breaks?

9: Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen

The goose, a stupid, quarrelsome and inelegant bird, has a sacred history, being associated with Osiris in Egypt and Juno in Rome. Cupid was often sighted riding on a goose before he grew wings of his own and the Mother Goose of fairy tale also possessed the craft to get them airborne. Juno had a partiality for bonding with birds and in her Dublin reincarnation she would be saddled in her turn, though by a paycock. The domestic history of the goose is brief: its fate was to be clipped and fattened for the table, its feathers good enough stuffing for beds. Only the finest of its quills might have the honour to be chosen to furnish the flights of arrows.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ambiguous feelings towards his most celebrated fictional character Sherlock Holmes, and dismayed a huge readership by killing him off in 1901. The book he himself regarded as his best was a historical novel, somewhat after the manner of Sir Walter Scott, called The White Company, which he wrote in 1891. Among the central characters is one Samkin Aylward, a surname Conan Doyle used again in the novel Sir Nigel of 1905, which appears to have been a prequel. Though in the books, the Aylwards are exemplary English Yeoman stock, the name has strong Irish connections and with the Waterford area in particular.

Doyle may have been acquainted with this ancient Irish bloodline and perhaps a certain Florence Aylward was also enthused by the historic associations of her name, although she was born in Sussex in 1862 and died in 1950. There is little published biographical information about her, except that she was a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music. Florence wrote a small number of ballads on patriotic and romantic subjects with titles such as Roses of England and Love's Coronation. There was also a cycle of Four Flower Songs. Without evidence to the contrary, it would appear that she was so impressed by a scene in Chapter Six of The White Company, where a ballad is sung by her namesake to an assembled company that she set the words to music. There is nothing of the antique about her setting which is a bold and heroic march-style production. It was in print by 1898 and a recording was made as early as 1903. It would be a pity to give just the words she set without also reproducing the context of in which they originally appeared and which adds so much to their savour.

"Many a time in the after days Alleyne Edricson seemed to see that scene, for all that so many which were stranger and more stirring were soon to crowd upon him. The fat, red-faced gleeman, the listening group, the archer with upraised finger beating in time to the music, and the huge sprawling figure of Hordle John, all thrown into red light and black shadow by the flickering fire in the centre &endash; memory was to come often lovingly back to it. At the time he was lost in admiration at the deft way in which the jongleur disguised the loss of his two missing strings, and the lusty, hearty fashion in which he trolled out his little ballad of the outland bowmen, which ran in some such fashion as this:

What of the bow?
The bow was made in England:
Of true wood, of yew wood,
The wood of English bows;
So men who are free
Love the old yew tree
And the land where the yew tree grows.

What of the cord?
The cord was made in England:
A rough cord, a tough cord,
A cord that bowmen love;
So we'll drain our jacks
To the English flax
And the land where the hemp was wove.

What of the shaft?
The shaft was cut in England:
A long shaft, a strong shaft,
Barbed and trim and true;
So we'll drink all together
To the gray goose feather
And the land where the gray goose flew.

What of the men?
The men were bred in England:
The bowman--the yeoman--
The lads of dale and fell
Here's to you--and to you;
To the hearts that are true
And the land where the true hearts dwell.

"Well sung, by my hilt!" shouted the archer in high delight. "Many a night have I heard that song, both in the old war-time and after in the days of the White Company, when Black Simon of Norwich would lead the stave, and four hundred of the best bowmen that ever drew string would come roaring in upon the chorus. I have seen old John Hawkwood, the same who has led half the Company into Italy, stand laughing in his beard as he heard it, until his plates rattled again. But to get the full smack of it ye must yourselves be English bowmen, and be far off upon an outland soil."

Ever since that night has many a roaring Englishman dreamed of a long shaft and a strong shaft by his hilt, though the full smack of it may never have been felt so well on any other night of trolling out. To have had it set to music by a woman adds somewhat to the piquancy. The bedroom was certainly in Conan Doyle's mind for the chapter is entitled How Samkin Aylward Wagered His Feather-Bed. The song itself is twice removed from us in time, being supposedly an old ballad, employed here for a deliberate evocation of racial memory in the fictive audience, among whom we sit and eavesdrop. It is effectively a recruiting song for the singer, who has just returned from France to England. He goes on to say,

"It passes me," he cried, "how all you lusty fellows can bide scratching your backs at home when there are such doings over the seas. Look at me--what have I to do? It is but the eye to the cord, the cord to the shaft, and the shaft to the mark. There is the whole song of it. It is but what you do yourselves for pleasure upon a Sunday evening at the parish village butts."

Now the innuendoes come flying nearly as thick and fast as in Wordsworth's unsung sonnet that begins "Open your gates, ye everlasting piles!" which also manages to travel on downhill long after reason says it should desist. After outlining the freedom and rewards of the military life we get the recruiting pitch proper,

"What say you, woodman: wilt leave the bucks to loose a shaft at a nobler mark?"
The forester shook his head. "I have wife and child at Emery Down," quoth he; "I would not leave them for such a venture."

When the assembled company persist in their loyalty to home and hearth, the challenge to their masculinity becomes more explicit:

"By my hilt I believe that the men of England are all in France already, and that what is left behind are in sooth the women dressed up in their paltocks and hosen."

The challenge is met:

"We have had enough bobance and boasting," said Hordle John, rising and throwing off his doublet. "I will show you that there are better men left in England than ever went thieving to France."

"Pasques Dieu!" cried the archer, loosening his jerkin, and eyeing his foeman over with the keen glance of one who is a judge of manhood. "I have only once before seen such a body of a man."

The cry of Pasque Dieu! is difficult to imagine in a straight gruff voice. And things get still worse:

 " . . .Come out, and we shall see who is the better man."
"But the wager?"
"I have nought to wager. Come out for the love and the lust of the thing."
"Nought to wager!" cried the soldier. "Why, you have that which I covet above all things. It is that big body of thine that I am after."

He means as a soldier of course, and the wager is Hordle John's service in France against a feather-bed which Aylward has brought back with other loot from the continent. The tension has to resolve itself in violence, as by a peeling of mythic clothing along with the outer garments of the wrestlers we feel ourselves drawn back to the encounter of another Bowman with a giant foe who will turn out to be a bosom comrade. By a skilful move, the big man's weight is turned against him and he is sent flying out of the ring, only kept from serious injury by a serendipitous landing in the belly of a sleeping artist, who slopes off, blaming the ale for his sudden pain. If the bed had been won we would have had a shorter story but the association of the feathers and cowardice had traditionally been with flight from enemies and is here varied to become associated with ignoring the call of duty and resting at home. The sexual ambiguities are now widely viewed as an intrinsic feature of the great imperial adventure as the roll-call of great Empire-Builders seems to have turned into an outing of sexual nonconformists from General Gordon to Lawrence of Arabia, taking in Baden-Powell and Montgomery along the way.

The association of the soldiers with geese continues in the tone poem "With the Wild Geese" which Irish composer Hamilton Harty wrote for the Cardiff Festival of 1910. Inspired by two poems from the 1902 collection of the same name by the poetess the Honourable Emily Lawless, 1845 - 1913, it deals with the sad fate of the Irish soldiers who fought for France at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745. The music depicts the camp on the night before battle, the soldier's dreams of home, then a call to arms is followed by a lament for the dead. These soldiers do not however stay dead but are resurrected as wild geese, in which shape they migrate home to the coast of County Clare. This picturesque old Celtic legend which seems to make a magical association between the flight of the arrow and the migrations of the soul, is actually a modification to the version in the Lawless poems. Her battle is very much in the age of gunpowder and her warrior spirits return to their home, preserving their own shapes.

The Honourable Emily held strongly Nationalist views and her poems are not at all the lyric evocations we might expect from Harty's tone poem. Here is the ending of the first of the two poems, which takes us up to the battle itself in which the Clare Brigade snatched a victory for France by a final but costly assault on the English:

"Hark! yonder through the darkness one distant rat-tat-tat!
The old foe stirs out there, God bless his soul for that!
The old foe musters strongly, he's coming on at last,
And Clare's Brigade may claim its own wherever blows fall fast.
Send us, ye western breezes, our full, our rightful share,
For Faith, and Fame, and Honour, and the ruined hearths of Clare."

The second poem, "Fontenoy, 1745: Early dawn, Clare coast" takes us on to the return of the Clare Brigade as to their own coast. Commentaries on the tone poem refer to a transformation of the men into geese, an interpretation which may have originated with Harty or been grafted on from another version of the legend for Emily Lawless has no such twilight fancy. The slain warriors in her poem are seen as "joyous souls . . .Sailing home together, on the morning sea", turning their personal loss into a spiritual victory. These are unmistakably warrior spirits, "a merry rousing band" sweeping home triumphantly, justifying their personal sacrifice for a greater good, meaning the defeat of the hated English.

"Harken, stony hills of Clare, hear the charge we made;
See us come together, singing from the fight,
Home to Corca Baiscinn, in the morning light".

It is estimated that between 1691, when Patrick Sarsfield led the first wave of Wild Geese abroad after the Treaty of Limerick and 1745, the year of the battle of Fontenoy, 150,000 Irishmen died in the service of France alone. Huge numbers also died in the service of Spain and Austria. Lawless was no gentle whisperer of soft words but an Amazon poetess and in another of the Wild Geese poems she celebrates Ireland's diaspora of fighting exiles in these words:

"War-dogs, hungry and grey,
Gnawing a naked bone,
Fighters in every clime,
Every cause but our own."

Hamilton Harty displays nothing of this hard-bitten quality but the story he commemorates lies buried beneath the smooth surface of his tone poem, inviting the curious to follow the clues and reawaken the fighting spirit of Emily Lawless. There can be little doubt that in 1910 he was making a coded statement of support for the cause of Irish Nationalism. Harty received a British Knighthood in 1925 so the implicit anti-English sentiment of the tone poem cannot have offended anybody and may have gone unnoticed or been quietly condoned in Wales. The Battle of Fontenoy does not appear to have had enough resonance in the English racial memory and the poems of an Honourable Emily may have been taken on trust to be harmless.

Conan Doyle was Scottish born with Irish roots and the Bowmen theme appears to have been a myth which developed as a kind of Celtic chain letter. Certainly it was another Celt, Welsh-born Arthur Machen, real name Arthur Llewellyn Jones, 1863 - 1947, whose story The Bowmen, published in the London Evening News in September 1914 was fed back into the public imagination when First War soldiers were ready to swear they had seen the flight of angels with bows, mustering in the heavens for the British cause. The story actually features the phantom Bowmen as indistinct shining shapes rather than angels which was a twist given by the public imagination. Olivier's Henry V with Walton's music used the same Agincourt image of a flight of arrows to bolster National pride in the Second World War, more graphic but maybe less potent. Machen's tale itself had at least one musical consequence and The Angel of Mons was turned into the name of a salon waltz by one Paul Paree. The illustrated cover of the music can be seen on the Web and is the only mark left on the world by that composer with so unconvincing a name.

Machen described himself as "a past-master in the Lodge of disappointment" in his introduction to The Bowmen when it was reprinted in book form as The Bowmen and other Legends of the War in 1915. It was Machen's usual stance in his prefaces to emphasize his imagination as the source of his material, pouring cold water on those who wished to see him as a Magus of the Golden Dawn. This myth of the spectral Agincourt archers returning to fight alongside the English WW1 soldiers seemed to strike exactly the right chord as being both patriotic and mysterious. Machen's perplexed account of the life of the story after it left his quill tells of how he was bombarded with enquiries from occultists and clergymen, swearing it could not have been his own invention. There were many requests for permission to reprint the story in parish magazines and it was widely distributed in this form as a morale-booster, without necessarily being signalled clearly as fiction. Machen's disclaiming of psychic powers took a further twist with the reprinting of his 1895 portmanteau story collection The Three Impostors. Again he denies any real world basis for the tales when written but adds that, years afterwards, he began to meet the characters of the book in a series of strange synchronicities based around a kidnapping. It is believed he was referring to incidents in the psychic warfare which broke out between Crowley and Mathers over the leadership of the Golden Dawn.

Machen is a writer steeped in ambiguities. His dialogue can be seriously bad and he has never been afforded a place in the pantheon of English Literature, just a seat at the low table of fantastic fabulists. In recent years, he has developed a following in the United States, where his stories were often reprinted in classic and now collectable pulp anthologies of Weird Tales and early Science Fiction. He was acknowledged as a major influence by that now acknowledged High Priest of American fantasy H. P. Lovecraft. In England, Machen had a musical disciple in John Ireland who perhaps saw with his own eyes some of the phantasms Machen had only dreamed of. The Scarlet Ceremonies was one of a number of Ireland titles which were inspired by the writer, and the phrase was taken from his other-worldly novella The White People. This may be his best work and it appears to have no link with The White Company of Conan Doyle beyond the colour.

Here is the climactic moment of The Bowmen where Machen sutures the bloodbaths of the trenches to a motto read in a queer vegetarian restaurant and cuts to the quick. The battle is looking lost and the grey German hordes have been eating into the British ranks:

"World without end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered &endash; he says he cannot think why or wherefore &endash; 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 &endash; 300 yards away &endash; 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 cry of "a long bow and a strong bow" suggests that Machen was paraphrasing the Conan Doyle ballad, though the source of both author's Saint Georgery must be Shakespeare's Henry V. It is as if the sexual charge of the original words could no longer be so sure of being politely overlooked. Freud had happened since 1891, not to mention Oscar Wilde. Even a Christian prayer for deliverance would seem naïve. Gods mysteriously connected with both queerness and vegetation might however respond to a remembered Latin motto off a plate. The urgent need for patriotic fodder may have blinded the clergymen who reprinted the story to Machen's parody of Christian sacrifice. The substituted nuts for steak of the vegetarian restaurant are a plain allusion to the growth away from animal sacrifice to symbol. Not quite so blasphemous as Wilfred Owen's famous evocation of the Abraham who raised his knife to slaughter not only his son but "Half the seed of Europe one by one". There is Machen's detachment to deal with, the "irrelevant" Christian prayer is fruitless but the "pious vegetarian motto" breeds an army of spiritual helpers to mow down the enemy with their arrows. This weird, invisible means of death is put down by the enemy as the latest poison gas. It has the look of being a casual indeed flippant performance and Machen frankly owned that he considered it a weak piece as literature. Yet the tone that can be neither entirely serious nor entirely satirical is entirely characteristic of this Janus-faced writer. It could at least be said that instead of a holocaust of British soldiers, the story produced a fine harvest of British nuts.

The real and terrible Battle of Mons in 1914 had been no laughing matter. Not the least curious aspect is that one of the chroniclers present at Mons was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who kept his eyes on the battleground and reported no angelic interventions. He was soon to be reporting many.

Conan Doyle, a Catholic, more specifically a Jesuit, by education declared himself an atheist in early adulthood and resisted the bribery of a relative to return to the fold. It suggests that he took matters of belief seriously and was prepared to go out on a limb. This, increasingly, he did, after embracing Spiritualism, before the death of a son and a brother in the Great War, which is usually treated as the trigger. For the public there was the mysterious spectacle of the creator of the ultra-rational Holmes embracing the Cottingley Fairies in 1920. Though the American critic Edmund Wilson did later speak of the appeal of Holmes as resting in his exposure of "the dual nature of the world".

The face of Conan Doyle in a post-mortem spirit picture, he is on the Right.

 

In fact, Conan Doyle was no lightning convert to Spiritualism and he had been impressed by telepathy experiments at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society as early as 1880. Initially friendly with the American magician and escapologist Harry Houdini, relations were strained when Conan Doyle's wife produced spirit communications from Houdini's mother in perfect English. Houdini was startled by her mastery in Death of the language she had never learned as a Jewish immigrant to America. In a statement, Houdini spoke of Conan Doyle's background as affecting his outlook: "Being uninitiated in the world of mystery, never having been taught the artifice of conjuring, it was the simplest thing in the world for anyone to . . . hoodwink him". For his part, Conan Doyle continued to believe that Houdini's illusions were to some degree dependent on psychic powers, whatever Houdini himself said. Anyone reading carefully the quoted words will wonder if a greater illusion was not being worked on the uninitiated everywhere.

Harry Houdini listening to a medium.

Conan Doyle's Intelligence links have not been thoroughly explored. Certainly his History of the Boer War was a highly patriotic performance. He volunteered but was turned down for military service at the age of 40 but became a doctor at the Bloemfontein Field Hospital. His shocking documentary exposé of the atrocities of Belgian rule in the Congo, published in 1909, came from the same place as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and appears to have had a humanitarian motivation which would not have conflicted with British interests in the area. His main source in the Congo was Roger Casement, to whom Doyle remained faithful when he was later tried for treason by the British Government. That case seemed to be suspended between two worlds: was Casement a traitor to Britain, if his loyalty was to a Free Ireland? The appeals on his behalf from men of letters were undermined for the general public by the mysterious and convenient discovery of the pederastic Black Diaries. There are still those who refuse to believe that an Irish patriot could also have been a wildly promiscuous boy-hunter and there has never been any clear resolution of the contradictory accounts given of their provenance. Casement was hanged in 1916. It was as if the British Establishment had decided, in a mythos of its own, that every twenty-one years a queer Irish Freemason had to be ritually sacrificed.

It has been suggested that Conan Doyle's personal and inconvenient stand on the Casement Trial blocked moves that would have led him to a seat in the House of Lords. It is notable that it is after the execution of Casement that Conan Doyle becomes Spiritualism's chief Celebrity, as if the check to his ambitions in this world had focussed his thoughts more intensely on another.

In 1917 Conan Doyle published His Last Bow, a collection of 8 Sherlock Holmes stories of which the title story comes last and is described as An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. The title prepares us for the end of a drama and the last bow in which the actors appear as themselves. It is a thin piece, essentially just wartime propaganda and anyone reaching beyond the half-way point without any mention of the great detective will figure it all out. In the present context, however, the reader may see an echo of the last bow drawn by another English hero, the arrow shot by the dying Robin Hood to determine where he would be buried. There is no such explicit reference to bows and arrows in the text but the German spy is early characterized as an eagle, whose huge Benz car would waft him back to London. As the trap is sprung, Holmes remarks how "This should put another bird in the cage" and at the end gives warning of a cold East wind coming, presumably Communism. Holmes returns to his retirement of bee-keeping on which he has published a curiously titled volume: "Practical Handbook of Bee Culture with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen". He compares the organization of the hive to that of the underworld, finding in both an order which escapes less sensitized minds.

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001

version III, 16th March, 2001

IIIb, minor revsisions, July, 2006