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Beskrivelse
A sequel to "The Angel of Mons: A World War I Legend," "Bellicourt Tunnel: The Crowning Battle of the Great War" brings the characters Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill, the fictional Tommy Atkins, the Revenant (souls returned from death), and soldiers from the 30th Division, American Expeditionary Force, together in a story of angels and the spirits of British soldiers killed early in the war in the battle that broke the Hindenburg Line. On August 23, 1914 in the first battle against the Germans in the Great War the British Expeditionary Force, facing double the number of enemy, was in peril of annihilation. At the moment the Huns were to cross the Nimy Bridge at the Mons-Cond Canal, St. George at the lead and a horde of cavalry angels swarmed down from the sky, repelled the Germans. Among the British, soldier Lieutenant Maurice Dease, gallantly commanding two machine gun sections at the bridge, wounded three times, died-and his spirit rose to St. George's side in the sky. And St. George brought lowly Private Tommy Atkins-one of Dease's gunners, killed by shrapnel that pierced his throat-back to life to fight on through the war. The 27th and 30th Divisions of the American Expeditionary Force arrived in June, 1918 for training near the Front in France. Corporal Atkins was Lead Instructor for Lewis machine gun sections, Company "M", 118th Infantry Regiment, 30th Division, American Expeditionary Force, South Carolinians from Sumter, Columbia, Mountain Home, and St. Helena Island. They would fight attached to the British Fourth Army. Atkins and his instructors trained them for leading the attack at Bellicourt Tunnel and breaking the Hindenburg Line, a military and spiritual barrier. Because of the assignment's importance, Atkins initiated the two teams into the "Golden Arrows of God." A mystical order within the secret "Messieurs de St. Georges" in Mons, Belgium, the "Golden Arrows of God" carried out orders dictated by St. George to the Hierophant, the order's leader. Officially identity of its membership of a dozen was known only by the Hierophant. Though this could not be so. The people knew they were men of power and honor, learned and wise, and whose ordination came from St. George himself. No one ever spoke about who the members were, but the people were wise enough to know. In manuscripts from the 1400's the order was already described as an ancient and powerful organ for spiritual and brotherly good and in direct communion with the City's patron saint. Their first sight of Atkins drew forth trust, admiration, and hope from the Gamecocks and Swamp Foxes. Inwardly they bowed to Instructor Thomas Atkins, he, worthy of high regard. But how they knew, none could fathom. Slowly, through their own senses, faint impulses, they felt the otherworldly in Atkins. More than once, when they caught him in peripheral vision they saw his face shine. Once, for an instant, it flashed bright as the sun, and all saw. A slight thrill of the breath all the way to unprovoked joy rising in their hearts-signs they received of the workings of Atkins power. Atkins' spirit comrades will help these Americans in battle. In the last weeks of September, 1918-historians would later call it The One Hundred Days, or The Advance to Victory-these boys, these soldiers, were leading a new life, an ocean away from home, among ways of life they had never seen, a war that wore the body and stunned the senses, the mind, the imagination. The machine gunners saw destruction and misery, breathed the stench of life's raw elements, putrid decay and rot. They heard the guns and explosions, breathed burned gunpowder and explosives. The cooking was not their mothers'. They had to learn the British Army way of doing things. Now, at the Battle of Bellicourt Tunnel angel warriors will prepare and help the Americans in one last great battle.
