The Angels of Mons

It was at Mons, in Belgium, where the British Expeditionary Force had its first major battle against the Germans in the Great War. This battle took place on the 22nd and 23rd of August 1914. The British, although heavily outnumbered, were at first able to repel the advancing German soldiers, but then had to retreat rapidly with heavy losses of men and equipment. This retreat brought home to the people of Britain that defeating the Germans wasn’t going to be the game of cricket that they had fondly imagined.

Some months later, beginning in April 1915, stories began to emerge that many British soldiers had, during the Battle of Mons, seen ghostly visions which included visions of the patron saint of England, St George, and of  medieval longbow-wielding warriors, and of hovering angels, and of a white luminous cloud which shrouded the advancing German soldiers.

These visions have since become the legend of “The Angels of Mons”.

What actually were these visions all about? Did they have their genesis in a short patriotic story called “The Bowmen” which a journalist, Arthur Machen, had written, and which appeared in a London newspaper, “The Evening News”, on September 29th 1914? Arthur Machen, himself, thought his little story to be the ultimate cause of the ghostly visions at Mons, but not everyone agreed.

“The Bowmen” was set on a battlefield very like the one at Mons. In the story, eighty thousand English soldiers are up against three hundred thousand Germans. The English are on the point of being surrounded and annihilated. Nonetheless they keep firing at the advancing and enveloping foe. There are so many of the enemy that the English are doomed, and know it. Some soldiers even exchange farewell handshakes.

It is then that one of the English soldiers remembers having once or twice eaten in a vegetarian restaurant. The plates in this restaurant had on them a printed figure of St George in blue, with a motto in Latin, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius (May St. George be a present help to the English). While the soldier is firing his rifle, he chants over and over this Latin motto that he’d seen in the restaurant.

He feels a shudder and an electric-like shock pass through his body. The roar of battle dies down, and a great voice from somewhere cries out “Array, array, array”. Then thousands of voices cry out as if in answer, “St George! St George!”.

The soldier then sees before him a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They look like medieval bowmen. They release swarms of arrows which fly through the air towards the Germans, who fall to the ground dead in their many thousands.

The story ends:

…..there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.

The story of the “The Bowmen” became so popular, and so many people thought it was true, and so many others were interpreting it in such odd ways, that Arthur Machen was persuaded to write a lengthy explanatory preface to the story when it was published in book form in August 1915.

In his preface, Machen told of how the story of “The Bowmen” came to him:

This was in last August, to be more precise, on the last Sunday of last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday morning between meat and mass. It was in “The Weekly Dispatch” that I saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect the details; but I have not forgotten the impression that was then on my mind, I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and for ever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the deacon was singing the Gospel.

Machen elaborated further, saying:

……..the origins of “The Bowmen” were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal places to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling’s story of the ghostly Indian regiment got in my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always there; and so The Bowmen was written.

Machen described the initial reactions to “The Bowmen”. A few days after the story’s newspaper publication…..

……the editor of “The Occult Review” wrote to me. He wanted to know whether the story had any foundation in fact. I told him that it had no foundation in fact of any kind or sort; I forget whether I added that it had no foundation in rumour but I should think not, since to the best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly interposition in existence at that time. Certainly I had heard of none. Soon afterwards the editor of “Light” wrote asking a like question, and I made him a like reply. It seemed to me that I had stifled any “Bowmen” mythos in the hour of its birth.

This, however, was not to be, for…….

…….A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of parish magazines to reprint the story. I–or, rather, my editor–readily gave permission; and then, after another month or two, the conductor of one of these magazines wrote to me, saying that the February issue containing the story had been sold out, while there was still a great demand for it. Would I allow them to reprint “The Bowmen” as a pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving the exact authorities for the story? I replied that they might reprint in pamphlet form with all my heart, but that I could not give my authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention.

The priest wrote again, suggesting–to my amazement–that I must be mistaken, that the main “facts” of “The Bowmen” must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history. It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size.

This was not the end of it, because……..

.……..it was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an officer–name and address missing–said that there was a portrait of St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results. Another variant–this, I think, never got into print–told how dead Prussians had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies.

Later versions of Machen’s tale featured a cloud that……

………interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will he noted, has disappeared–he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants–and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows.

What about the alleged angels? They began to appear in yet later variations of Machen’s story because……..

……..my imagined soldier saw “a long line of shapes, with a shining about them.” And Mr. A.P. Sinnett, writing in the May issue of “The Occult Review”, reporting what he had heard, states that “those who could see said they saw ‘a row of shining beings’ between the two armies.” Now I conjecture that the word “shining” is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become “the Angels of Mons………

Were there other deeper reasons why angels superseded bowmen in these later variations? Machen thought that St George was little more than a patriotic figurehead, and that otherwise appealing to saints for succour was generally un-English, with saints appealing more to Catholics. It is angels, rather than saints, which have resonated with English culture more. Hence it was inevitable that angels would, in the later stories, replace the bowmen and the various other ghostly warriors. Or so thought Arthur Machen.

Machen made the point that the supernatural elements in these stories were based on hearsay:

They rest on the second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by “a soldier,” by “an officer,” by “a Catholic correspondent,” by “a nurse,” by any number of anonymous people………..Someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has talked to a soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. But that is not evidence………

However, there was a named soldier who said he had seen angels at Mons. He was Private 10515 Robert Cleaver of the 1st Cheshire Regiment, who swore an affidavit to this effect before a Justice of the Peace, George Hazelhurst, in the county of Flint, North Wales. Later on, Hazelhurst heard rumours that Private Cleaver had not, after all, fought at Mons. Hazelhurst checked with Cleaver’s headquarters in Salisbury, and was told by the Record Officer that Cleaver was mobilised at Chester on August 22nd 1914, and was sent to France on the 22nd of September – a month after the Battle of Mons.

Hence Private Cleaver is assumed to have lied, because the information the army Record Officer supplied, directly contradicted what Private Cleaver had sworn to. But, the assumption that Private Cleaver was wrong, and the army Record Officer right, is a mere value judgement. Could, though, the army Record Officer have been wrong? Just because he represented Official Authority shouldn’t necessarily have meant that the information he supplied was true. He could have been told by his superior officer to give out false information for propagandistic or political reasons. Or he could inadvertently have looked in the wrong file and supplied information about the service record of another soldier.

Why would Private Cleaver deliberately have sworn a false oath? There appeared no motive to do so, so a deliberate fraud seemed unlikely. Far more likely would have been an honest mistake by the army Record Officer.

Here is a description of a sighting of bowmen at Mons, a description made impressive because of its seeming sincerity. It was in a letter written from the front by a Catholic officer:

A party of about thirty men and an officer was cut off in a trench, when the officer said to his men, ‘Look here, we must either stay here and be caught like rats in a trap, or make a sortie against the enemy. We haven’t much of a chance, but personally I don’t want to be caught here.’ The men all agreed with him, and with a yell of ‘St.George for England!’ they dashed out into the open. The officer tells how, as they ran on, he became aware of a large company of men with bows and arrows going along with them, and even leading them on against the enemy’s trenches, and afterwards when he was talking to a German prisoner, the man asked him who was the officer on a great white horse who led them, for although he was such a conspicuous figure, they had none of them been able to hit him. I must also add that the German dead appeared to have no wounds on them. The officer who told the story was a friend of ours. He did not see St.George on the white horse, but he saw the Archers with his own eyes.

The following was allegedly told to a nurse by a Lancashire Fusilier who was at the Battle of Mons:

It’s true, Sister. We all saw it. First there was a sort of a yellow mist like, sort of risin’ before the Germans as they came to the top of the hill, come on like a solid wall they did–springing out of the earth just solid, no end to ’em. I just gave up. No use fighting the whole German race, thinks I; it’s all up with us. The next minute comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off there’s a tall man with yellow hair in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying, “Come on boys! I’ll put the kybosh on the devils.” … The minute I saw it, I knew we were going to win. It fair bucked me up–

Here is an alleged extract from an officer’s letter:

I myself saw the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans during the retreat from Mons. We heard the German cavalry tearing after us and ran for a place where we thought a stand could be made; we turned and faced the enemy expecting instant death. When to our wonder we saw between us and the enemy a whole troop of Angels; the horses of the Germans turned round frightened out of their senses; they regularly stampeded, the men tugging at their bridles, while the horses tore away in every direction from our men. Evidently the horses saw the Angels as plainly as we did, and the delay gave us time to reach a place of safety.

There were so many accounts of sightings of aetherial bowmen or angels, that it’s reasonable to suppose that at least some of these accounts were true. Which is to say that at least some soldiers and officers genuinely experienced seeing bowmen or angels. This was the conclusion of the Society for Psychical Research. These phenomena may have been hallucinations, or they may have been visitors from another dimension or parallel world. The images which came into Arthur Machen’s head as he sat in the church, and which inspired his short story, could have been his mind telepathically tapping in to the minds of soldiers on the Mons battlefield.

Most soldiers in battle are invariably in a state of exhaustion, which would lower their psychic defenses against invasions from parallel worlds. This is no doubt why soldiers in battle have seen aetherial visions throughout history. For instance at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642 during the English Civil War, soldiers supposedly saw the dead from the battle rising from the earth. At a battle on Marston Moor, there were reports of horsemen seen in the sky. Spirits were supposed to have assaulted a British garrison in America in 1692. In the 18th century there were heavenly sightings at Culloden (during the Jacobite Uprising) and at a battlefield called Souter Fell.

As for the Angels of Mons, the arguments about whether or not they were real will continue for as long as men live.

Sources:

– Wikipedia
– “The Bowmen” by Arthur Machen
– Arthur Machen’s Special Preface to “The Bowman”
– Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War – David Clarke
– Visions of Bowmen and Angels – Kevin McClure
– The Case of the Elusive Angels of Mons – Alan S Coulson and Michael E Hanlon