‘The Great Return’ is Machen’s imagining of the events that would follow the return of the Holy Grail to British lands, set in a welsh village during the First World War. It opens establishing some sort of protagonist, but he is completely forgotten upon the arrival to the village of Llantrisant in favour of recounting the fractured miracles that occurred when the Grail appeared. The opening discussing the unexplainable being dismissed, in relation to the figure of the poltergeist, somewhat justifies the lack of conclusion or explanation following the strange events, whereas there is no particular consequences or conclusion to the story and it more reads as a factual recount with the characters it set up in the opening being entirely dismissed. It was a peculiar story, but lacked stakes and any sort of development in terms of both character and plot. I recently read ‘The Bowmen’ by Machen and through it wasn’t anything special, it covered the same themes and ideas of Arthurian miracle during the war, also lacking development but to a more effective standard, in forty less pages.