Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time—
they were never on time. Hitler didn’t invent
the autobahn, either; it was already there when
he took office. And the bowmen of Agincourt
didn’t appear at the Battle of Mons on August 23, 1914
to win the day for the heavily outnumbered British.

Officer after officer said they saw them, though,
saw “a long line of shapes, with a shining about them”
raining thousands of arrows upon the enemy.
Afterward, the German general staff insisted their troops
were not defeated by phantom archers but by Turpinite,
a nerve gas developed by chemist Eugène Turpin

that was delivered by artillery shells and tested
prior to the battle on a herd of 400 sheep.
Catherine the Great died of illness. She wasn’t crushed
by the weight of a horse she was trying to mate with.
That was a rumor started by the French, who were jealous
of her power and, in the sex department, have a lot

to answer for themselves. 17% of Americans think
Joan of Arc is Noah’s wife. Turpin himself was present
at the Turpinite test and said afterward that there was
just a faint odor of methylated spirit in the air
and that the subjects of his experiment were to a sheep
unharmed and “seemed only, perhaps, a little more gay.”

No one will remember you if you say there’s no such thing
as a magical nerve gas or that there was no miracle
that day on the battlefield. If you say milk is good
for you or that we should love our mothers, your listener
will turn back to the buffet table or suddenly remember
an important appointment elsewhere. Another observer

of the Turpinite test reported that, after the smoke cleared,
“of the 400 sheep, 400 were dead," frozen in place
with the grass hanging from their mouths. That account
appeared in all the newspapers. And more than one
British officer told how the corpses of German soldiers
had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds.