PROLOGUE
Mons, Belgium, the Western Front, August 23, 1914
“Hold the line!” the captain shouted. “Hold the damned line!”
But the German onslaught was simply too overwhelming, the line of British soldiers holding them off too thin. Already the trench was littered with the dead, and Captain Mills was certain that he would soon be lying among them. If this rear guard action failed, then the entire British Expeditionary Force, now in retreat, could be overrun and annihilated by the advancing horde.
Right now that annihilation looked inevitable.
A hand grenade, hurled by one of the advancing Huns, arced above the last tattered line of barbed wire, looking oddly like a blackbird swooping down to earth. It landed on top of one of the few remaining Vickers machine guns, blowing the gunners to smithereens. Mud and blood, flesh and bones, rained down on the soldiers still clinging to their rifles and firing as rapidly as they could.
As Mills hunkered down to reload, the clatter of exploding shells grew deafening. When he dared raise his head again above the lip of the trench, he saw what looked like another great gray wave of soldiers, bayonets extended, marching implacably forward. My God, how many could there be? They’d been coming all morning—mown down like grass—but there were always more, and more, and more.
He fired a shot and a man went down, instantly replaced by another stepping over the fallen body, and a dozen others behind him. They were only fifty or sixty yards off, and Mills knew that the soldiers left in his battalion could no more hold them at bay than they could turn back an ocean tide.
Nothing but a miracle could save them now.
Wiping the sweat from his eyes—there was so much dirt and debris in the air that Mills could barely see what he was shooting at—he prayed for just that: a miracle. There was a plaque to St. George, the patron saint of England, which had once hung on the schoolroom wall where he taught mathematics. Its motto, which he now murmured under his breath, read Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius. May St. George be a present help to the English. That was all the Latin he’d ever mastered, but he had no sooner uttered the words than a cold shudder went down his spine. He felt an icy tingling in his fingertips, and for a second, he thought he must have been shot.
The cloud of smoke that clung to the no man’s land before him seemed to thicken, obscuring the oncoming Huns. Damn, now he wouldn’t even be able to spot the bastards before they were close enough to stick him with their bayonets.
“Where are they?” Foster shouted from down the line. “I can’t see a bloody thing anymore!”
And yet, the battlefield had not grown darker, but lighter. There were shapes coalescing in the fog, shapes that seemed to be somehow . . . radiant. What was going on?
To the constant rattle of machine gun fire and blasts of artillery, another sound was added—a strange whistling noise, a whishing like wind through the rushes . . . and archaic cries of “Array! Array!” They seemed to be coming from all around.
And then, Mills thought he saw something equally impossible.
Archers, wearing the leather doublets and round helmets worn by the English bowmen who had won the Battle of Agincourt hundreds of years before . . . they were standing, ranks of them, in front of the fragile English lines, dispatching volley after volley of arrows at the approaching horde.
He heard the sound of galloping hooves, and glimpsed a knight in armor riding a white horse, rallying his ghostly troops with a raised sword, before being swallowed up in the mist.
Again, Mills wondered if he was still alive. None of this could be real. Maybe he had been shot, after all, and this was all the dream of a dying man.
But his prayer to St. George kept repeating in his head. He could hear the thwang of the bowstrings, letting fly another shot. Before long the onslaught had abated and the shining archers were gradually enveloped in the fog. The Germans fell back, the battlefield saturated with their blood, and even their artillery fire let up.
Thunderstruck, Mills lowered his rifle, resting the barrel on a sandbag, and glanced over at Foster, who had done the same, as had all the others left defending the trench.
“Did you see that?” Foster said.
Mills nodded, speechless, glad that someone else could attest to it.
“Because I still don’t believe that I did,” Foster added. A butcher in civilian life, he was not one to engage in flights of fancy. “I thought we were all goners for sure.”
So had Mills. So had every man still peering in disbelief out over the barren wasteland.
When the glowing fog lifted, Captain Mills stood up on the firing step and raised his binoculars, but there was no sign of the golden bowmen, nor of the knight on the white horse, anywhere.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured.
There was no reason to believe that the phantoms had ever been there at all . . . were it not for the inexplicable arrow wounds found in so many of the enemy corpses examined the next day.
CHAPTER ONE
Easton Glebe, Essex, England, February 1915
Although he usually did most of his writing earlier in the day, tonight H. G. Wells was at it long past dark, his head bent low over the desk tucked away in the sitting area off his bedroom. His pen scratched quickly across the pages, in an idiosyncratic handwriting that his wife, Jane, could read—and then transcribe on her typewriter—even when no one else could. Sometimes, she even took the liberty of improving some of his hastily written prose, finding a more precise word, or recasting a bit of dialogue altogether, and though he liked to chide her for her gall, secretly he appreciated it. She was his best reader, most capable editor, and, if the occasion called for it, bluntest critic.
So absorbed was he in his work that he must not have heard her footstep on the stairs, or the sound of the bedroom door opening. Ensconced in the warm nimbus of light from the banker’s lamp on the desk, he was startled when he heard her say, “H. G.? Don’t you think you’ve done enough for tonight?”
“What?” he muttered, his pen still flying across the page before the words escaped him.
“Dr. Gruber said you needed to take it easy. You’re not out of the woods quite yet.”
“I feel fine,” he said, still not raising his head. “Gruber worries too much.” He finished a sentence, pressing the period home. “And so do you.”
“It’s my job.”
“Right you are,” he said, shifting the completed page to the stack on his left. “And I am grateful beyond measure.” Looking up with a smile, he said, “But you may cease worrying now.”
She was a compact woman, no nonsense about her, brown hair tidily gathered in a bun.
“You have an early day tomorrow,” she added. “Time you got into bed.”
She was probably right. He was feeling a cramp in his neck, and his shoulders were stiff. When he was a young man, he’d been able to write all night long if the deadline called for it, but now—at forty-nine—even writing required a stamina he could not always muster. He put the pen, one of a dozen kept at the ready, back in its brass holder, and stretched his arms out in the silk dressing gown. Perhaps he was written out for the day; better to start fresh in the morning.
“By the way, I’ve had a telegram from the War Office, asking me to come in next week to confer about something,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. “Not the worst idea to show the colors in London now and then, anyway.”