"The Dazzling Light" by Arthur Machen

The new head-covering is made of heavy steel, which has been specialty treated to increase its resisting power. The walls protecting the skull are particularly thick, and the weight of the helmet renders its use in open warfare out of the question. The rim is large, like that of the headpiece of Mambrino, and the soldier can at will either bring the helmet forward and protect his eyes or wear it so as to protect the base of the skull... Military experts admit that continuance of the present trench warfare may lead to those engaged in it, especially bombing parties and barbed wire cutters, being more heavily armoured than the knights, who fought at Bouvines and at Agincourt. -The Times, July 22, 1915

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Listening to people on youtube who are from Croydon say the word Croydon, some say it as 'cry-den', others in the proper phonetic manner. Since even the locals can't seem to agree on the pronunciation, I'm going with the phonetic pronunciation.

Aug 16, 1914 - the war started July 28 with Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia. The British declared war on Germany on August 4. I can't quite find when the first British troops landed on the continent, but their first battle was Aug 23, so they must have had at least some troops ready to go right away.

Giltar Point, St. Margaret's Island, Caldy Island, all real places in Wales. Machen usually likes to make up place names, but for some reason this time he stuck to real world places. Hmmm...

I am fully aware of the British pronunciation of 'lieutenant', and since this is a British author talking about the British army, I no doubt should have used it, but I just cannot bring my American tongue to put an 'f' into a word which clearly has no possible 'f' sounding phoneme in the spelling. There is no 'ghoti' type non-sense going on with the word. Silent letters in words is one thing, but inserting non-existent letters when speaking a word aloud?! English spelling is troubled enough as it is, let's not make it even worse!

The picture used is French soldiers with their grenade-shooting crossbows. I had no idea this was ever a thing until I read this story!

There is also another crossbow-like bomb throwing weapon used by the French in WW1 called the Sauterelle, contrasted with the British Leach trench catapult. WW1 really was a crossroads between the centuries of warfare prior and the industralized warfare that was to come.

To follow along: https://web.archive.org/web/20120414102302/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/machen/arthur/angels-of-mons/chapter4.html#chapter4