Trevor Collins

You're fighting for your life.

You're fighting for a huge and greater cause.

And you're right.

There's nothing to do but to do it.

You are in it now.

so fight your butt off kind of thing.

And so, yeah, the general is kind of commenting on that.

And so I think that's important to know.

So you, one, have a crash course on what that battle is, what we're about to talk about.

And two, because I really wanted to convey as best I could the energy of the time, the thinking, what's going on with World War I cracking open, but also the inordinate odds, the retreat and how these soldiers are feeling.

Because all of this, I think,

motivates the concoction that sparks a legend, sparks this folklore that will last till now even.

That's a good point.

So here we are now, just a month after the Battle of Mons, and I'm going to give you straight up what we understand, what we know factually, rather than baiting you into the idea of what's real, what's not.

So here's the story.

On September 29th, 1914, a Welsh author named Arthur Macken published a short story titled The Bowman.

In the Evening News, which was a London newspaper at the time, he set his story during a retreat from the Battle of Mons.

So a very specific choice to pick a very real event.

In his work, he wrote that English soldiers called upon St.

George for help as they were being attacked.