INTRODUCTION
am glad to say, but I know that they were all true to type in this respect. Whether the deliverer was a dark obscuring cloud, a row of shining beings, the ghosts of slain soldiers still fighting for England—I have come across "traces," as the analysts would say, of this form of the story—St. George, St. Michael, the Blessed Joan of Arc, or angels; the intervention is always in the very nick of time, at the sharp moment of dreadful and instant need.
Thus my fable and the other fables; but there is nothing of this in the two pieces of evidence before us. The corporal says that the Uhlans had been beaten back with heavy loss some time before the showing of the shapes in the sky; when the vision was seen the need was no longer instant. The lieutenant-colonel agrees here with the corporal: "We came into action at dawn and fought till dusk.
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