THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES #7 – The Piper

MAG006 – Case #9220611 – Clarence Berry
Statement regarding time spent as a staff sergeant and serving alongside Wilfred Owen in the Great War.

The Magnus Archives sings an anthem for doomed youth from an NCO during World War I who sheds some interesting light on one of our most acclaimed war poets and reaps the spoils thereof.

Starring: The Archivist – Jonathan Sims
Writer: Jonathan Sims
Director / Editor: Alexander J Newall

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[jadentheenby]

I think the cynical tired attitude of the narrator is so funny when paired with the sincerity of the stories.
You get told a very earnest and soulful sounding tale and then /*CLICK*/ Narrator: now wasn’t that some shit!!! No fuckin organization!! Ugh, I gotta do EVERYTHING around here!!
It’s very funny and gives me a little whiplash every time 😂

[chrisradek]

Considering that Wilfred Owen was a real war poet who was renowned for finding ways to personify aspects of war in his writing, I find this strange, haunting story to be such an immensely intriguing one

[JesseColton]

This episode really deserves an award for the writing and performance, it could be a short story on its own even without the context of the Magnus Archives.

[amberjacobsen]

Joseph Rayner is a real person who served in WWI, you can read about him and see documents on his service and enlistment.
Where he lived, that he wasn't married, that he at some point went missing.

[cthulhufhtagn]

I did some research on Wilfred Owen after listening to this. One of his poems, "Strange Meeting", includes the line "Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were". If that inspired Owen's death, then dang did Jonny do some research.

[wonderwhatsgonnahappen]

Ah yes. The sound of battle cries and war cries, and that random haunting tune that keeps coming out of nowhere.

Music to my ears.

[Under_a_heat_lamp]

For some reason this episode makes me think that the disorganization is intentional. Like she was ensuring he’d read these by placing them in the wrong area. Can’t be sure of course.

[abagoffrozenspinach]

This has got to be one of my favourite episodes... something about old unknowable war harbingers just galloping across the battlefield blasting a trumpet with one arm while another arm is holding a movie popcorn bucket and another is flipping off Nazis and two more are dedicated to dabbing is so good, so classic, so timeless

[CatBATdrklycu]

Why do I get the sneaking feeling that there was a definite method to the previous archivist's madness?

[balticgopnik]

I heard the silent melody,
As a young, jolly, working maid.
And only when I told the soldiers what I heard they understood
The Piper must be payed.

Wilfred Owen went insane,
His 3rd eye opened in the field.
To the slaughtered soldier's thoughts true, but mundane,
From the Piper, there is no shield.

He still is there, in the battle field, alone.
Playing in that sad, sad tone.
A reminder from the past,
That a lot of soldiers never came home.

[yonderlighthouse]

I think all the English Literature students that had Exposure in their GCSE poem roster were quaking by the end of this.

[AshGreytree]

The description of The Piper combined with the time period in which the story takes place makes me imagine him in the style of old political cartoons with stark shading and crosshatching and faded colors, alongside features that just evoke this uncanny valley effect. Haunting.

[eleniaristeidou]

The description of War, although I know its a paranormal being here, makes for such a beautiful and macabre explenation of every war

[mywetaresocks_]

honestly any of these magnus archives story could make a better horror film than those produced in hollywood...

[petraivan]

ARCHIVIST
Statement of Staff Sergeant Clarence Berry, regarding his time serving with Wilfred Owen in the Great War. Original statement given November 6th, 1922. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
A lot of people call me lucky, you know. Not many came through the entirety of the war in one piece. And if you discount the burns, then I did indeed do just that. Even fewer spent all four years at the front, like I did. I was never sent for treatment for shell shock or injury, and even my encounter with a German flamethrower only ended up with me in a front line hospital at Wipers. I was still in that field hospital when the fighting started at the Somme, so I suppose that was lucky too.
Four years… I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who saw the whole damn show from start to finish, as though I alone know the Great War in all its awful glory. But deep down I know that honour, such as it is, has to go to Wilfred. You wouldn’t have thought it from his poems, but all told, his time at the front totalled not much over a year. Yet he got to know the war in a way I never did. He’s certainly the only person I know that ever saw The Piper.
I grew up poor on the streets of Salford, so I joined the army as soon as I was old enough. I know you’ve heard the stories of brave lads signing up at 14, but this was before the war started, so there wasn’t such a demand for manpower and the recruiters were much more scrupulous about making sure those enlisting were of age. Even so, I was almost too skinny for them to take me and barely made the required weight. But in the end I made it through and, after my training, was assigned to the Manchester Regiment, 2nd Battalion, and it wasn’t long before we were shipped off to France with the British Expeditionary Force. You seem like educated sorts, so I’m sure you read in the papers how that went. Soon enough, though, the trenches were dug and the boredom started to set in. Now, boredom is fine, understand, when the alternatives are bombs, snipers and gas attacks, but months at a time sitting in a waterlogged hole in the ground, hoping your foot doesn’t start swelling, well… it has a quiet terror all its own.
Wilfred came to us in July of 1916. I’m not intimately familiar with his history but he clearly came from stock good enough to be assigned as a probationary Second Lieutenant. I was a Sergeant at the time, so had the job of giving him the sort of advice and support that a new officer needs from a NCO with two years of mud under his nails. That notwithstanding, I will admit taking a dislike to the man when I first met him - he outranked me, and most of the others in the trench, in both military and social terms, and he seemed to treat the whole affair with an airy contempt. There’s a sort of numbness that you adopt after months or years of bombing, a deliberate blankness which I think offended him. He was unfailingly polite, far more so than I was accustomed to in the Flanders mud, where the conversations, such as they were, were coarse and bleak. Yet under this politeness I could feel him dismiss out of hand any suggestion that I gave him or report that I made. It came as no surprise to me when he mentioned he wrote poetry. To be perfectly honest I expected him to be dead within a week.
To Wilfred’s credit, he made it almost a year before anything horrendous happened to him, and by the following spring I’d venture to say that we might almost have been able to call each other friends. He had been composing poetry during this time, of course, and occasionally would read it out to some of the men. They generally enjoyed it, but personally I thought it was dreadful - there was an emptiness to it and every time he tried to put the war into words it just sounded trite, like there was no soul to what he had to say. He would often talk about his literary aspirations, and how he longed to be remembered, to take what this war truly was and immortalise it.
Were I prone to flights of fancy, I daresay I would call his words portentous. When he talked like that, he had an odd habit of trailing off in the middle of the conversation with a tilt of his head, as though his attention had been taken by a far-off sound.
The spring thaw had just recently passed when it happened, and we were on the offensive. Our battalion was near Savy Wood when the orders came down - we were to attack the Hindenburg Line. Our target was a trench on the west side of St. Quentin. It was a quiet march. Even at this stage there was often still some excitement when the orders came down for action, even if it was usually stifled by that choking fear that you got when waiting for the whistle. Yet that morning there was something different in the air, an oppressive dread. We’d made this attack before, and knew that the change from the valley exposed us to artillery fire. And artillery was always the scariest part of it for me. Bayonets you could dodge, bullets you could duck, even gas you could block out if you were lucky, but artillery? All you could do against artillery was pray.
Even Wilfred felt it, I could tell. He was usually quite talkative before combat. Morbid, but always talkative. That morning he didn’t say a word. I tried to talk with him and raise his spirits, as is a sergeant’s duty, but he just held up his hand to quiet me, and turned his head to listen. At the time I didn’t know what it was he was hearing but it kept him silent. Even when we crested the ridge, and the rest of us tried to drown out the deafening thrum of artillery with our own charging cry, even then he made no sound.
The ground shook with the impact of the mortar shells, and I ran from foxhole to crater to foxhole, keeping my head low to avoid the bullets. As I ran, I felt a shooting pain in my ankle and pitched forward into the mud. Looking down, I saw I’d been caught by a length of barbed wire, half-hidden by the damp upturned soil. I felt a surge of panic begin to overtake me, and frantically tried to remove the wire from my leg, but only succeeded in getting my hand scratched up quite badly.
I looked around desperately to see if there was anyone else nearby who could help. And there, not twenty yards in front of me, I saw Wilfred standing, his face blank and his head swaying to some unheard rhythm. And then I did hear it - gently riding over the pulse of mortars and the rattle of guns and the moans of dying men, a faint, piping melody. I could not have told you whether it was bagpipes or panpipes or some instrument I had never heard before, but its whistling tune was unmistakable, and struck me with a deepest sadness and a gentle creeping fear.
And in that moment I knew what was about to happen. I looked at Wilfred, and as our eyes met I saw that he knew as well. I heard a single gunshot, much louder than any of the others somehow, and I saw him go stiff, his eyes wide. And then the mortar blast hit him, and he was lost in an eruption of mud and earth.
I had plenty of time to mourn him, lying in that dreadful hole until nightfall, when I could free my leg as quietly and gently as possible before crawling back to our trench. It was slow going; every time a flare went up I could only lay motionless and pray, but the good Lord saw fit to let me reach our line relatively unscathed. I was quickly bundled off to the field hospital, which was overburdened as always. They didn’t have much in the way of medicine or staff to spare, and certainly no beds free, so they washed my wounds with iodine, bandaged them, sent me on my way. Told me to come back if I got gangrene.

[Varzio]

"Did you know that Hamelin is a real place in Germany?" - yep. Been there, it's a cute little town with lovely old buildings. :D

[bard]

The voice acting in this one is incredible.

[eleniaristeidou]

I want to believe that wilfred was used by the piper, or War and was happy to see the end of the fighting approach, even though he knew it would be his doom, because his dead and eventual defect of the vessel that creature used, would mean end of suffering. The imageries where beautiful by the way

[aplant]

The bit about the pied piper... That isn't a fairy tale, that shit happened. The story evolved a little, as in the original telling there weren't any rats or an agreement to get rid of them but there's *_hisorical records_* and *_accounts_* from Hammelin in the 1200s that 130 children were lured out of town by a mysterious piper and were never heard from again. It's utterly fascinating, the exact sort of thing statements are made of.

[missW]

I just want to say I've started relistening more carefully to each episode after having devoured all three seasons/beginning of season 4, and this episode is .... Really good. I got very invested in the descriptions, in the relationships between the characters, in the conversations... The description of the piper is awe-inspiring