Angels of Mons

On 26th August, 1914, General Horace Smith-Dorrien, ordered the British Expeditionary Force to engage the German Army at Le Cateau. The BEF managed to inflict heavy casualties on the advancing troops and were able to delay the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan. However, BEF also had significant losses with 7,812 of all ranks, killed, wounded and missing out of the 40,000 men who took part in the battle. That evening, General John French ordered the retreat from Mons to continue.

Over the next few days several soldiers recorded seeing mysterious visions. One young officer told Mabel Collins, the author of The Crucible (1915): "I had the most amazing hallucinations marching at night, so I was fast asleep, I think. Everyone was reeling about the road and seeing things.... I saw all sorts of things, enormous men walking towards me and lights and chairs and things in the road."

On 5th September, 1914, Brigadier-General John Charteris, the Chief Intelligence Officer at GHQ, reported that one particular vision, the Angel of Mons, was spreading "through the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress."

On 29th September 1914 Arthur Machen published a a ghost story, The Bowman, in the London Evening News. The story tells of a fierce rearguard action, based on the retreat from Mons. During the fighting, a British soldier suddenly remembers dinner plates used in a London restaurant that were decorated with the figure of St George and the motto Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius ("may St George be a present help to the English"). The soldier then sees a "long line of shapes... that resemble archers". The bowmen then "let fly a cloud of arrows at the advancing Germans, who fall dead in their thousands."

Machen later recalled the background of the story: "I looked out of my window one Sunday morning towards the end of August 1914, and saw some newspaper bills in front of the little shop over the way, and saw that the night had come... I have forgotten the detail of the newspaper account of (the retreat); but I remember it was a tale to make the heart sink, almost to deep despair. It told of the British army in full retreat, nay, in headlong, desperate retreat, on Paris.... The correspondent rather pictured an army broken to fragments scattered abroad in confusion. It was hardly an army any more; it was a mob of shattered men ... And I suppose that in the first place it was to comfort myself that I thought of the story of the Bowmen, and wrote it in the early days of September."

It was generally believed that the Angel of Mons myth probably came from Machen's story. However, as Ernest Sackville Turner has pointed out in his book, Dear Old Blighty (1980), It has never been explained how Machen's "long line of shapes, with a shining about them" became "a row of shining beings, and then a company of angels."

The Angel of Mons story also appeared in the All Saints Parish Magazine in Clifton in May 1915. It was reported that two junior officers told Sarah Marrable about what they saw on the retreat from Mons. "Both of whom had themselves seen the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans when they came right upon them during the retreat from Mons... One of Miss Marrable's friends, who was not a religious man, told her that he saw a troop of angels between us and the enemy. He has been a changed man ever since. The other man... and his company were retreating, they heard the German cavalry tearing after them... They therefore turned round and faced the enemy, expecting nothing but instant death, when to their wonder they saw, between them and the enemy, a whole troop of angels. The German horses turned round terrified and regularly stampeded. The men tugged at their bridles, while the poor beasts tore away in every direction."

In August 1915, Phyllis Campbell, contributed an article to The Occult Review entitled The Angelic Leaders, where she claimed falsely that "everyone has seen them (the Angels of Mons) who has fought from Mons to Ypres." Private Frank Richards was one of those soldiers on the retreat from Mons who did not see any angels. He later argued: "If any angels were seen on the retirement they were seen that night. March, march, for hour after hour, without a halt; we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between... But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat."

Philip J. Haythornthwaite, the author of The World War One Source Book (1992), has pointed out: "An employee of the author's grandfather was totally convinced that he had seen the angel; and although before the war he was known as a man over-fond of hard-drink, after Mons he became not only teetotal but a pillar of the community, apparently for no other reason that what he claimed to have experienced on the retreat."

It has been argued in The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians (2005) that the Angel of Mons myth was probably developed by Brigadier-General John Charteris, the Chief Intelligence Officer at GHQ, as a covert attempt by military intelligence to spread morale-boosting propaganda and disinformation. Steve MacGregor agrees with this suggestion: "To understand possible motives we need to look more closely at Charteris career and in particular at the significance of propaganda, disinformation and rumour in 1914. At that time the only means for the public to obtain news other than through personal contact with soldiers was through newspapers, magazines and letters from the front. This was often several days out of date, and content was strictly controlled by the authorities (reporters were not allowed near the front and generally had to rely on information provided by the army; censors controlled the content of soldiers letters). As a result there was a huge appetite for information, and rumours spread wildly by word of mouth. People eagerly repeated the most unlikely stories as fact.... This rumour was clearly beneficial to the Allied cause, and had the added advantage of official deniability without any loss of credibility."

Arthur Machen later expressed regret that the myth had grown up around his work of fiction and pointed out that the word angels did not appear in the story. As James Hayward has pointed out in his book, Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "Machen... blamed religious bodies for exploiting what he considered an unremarkable story, and concluded that any sightings of spectral hosts were explicable as mere hallucinations".

Despite Machen's objections, religious magazines continued to argue the story was true. On 24th April, 1915, Light Magazine argued: "Whether Mr Machen's story was pure invention or not, it was certainly stated in some quarters that a curious phenomenon had been witnessed by several officers and men in connection with the retreat from Mons. It took the form of a strange cloud interposed between the Germans and the British. Other wonders were heard or seen in connection with this cloud which, it seems, had the effect of protecting the British against the overwhelming hordes of the enemy."

Arthur Machen explained in the TP's Weekly: "It was all so entirely innocent, nay casual, on my part. A poor linnet of prose, I did but perform my indifferent piping in the Evening News because I wanted to do so, because I felt that the story of The Bowmen ought to be told... and then, somehow or other, it was as if I had touched the button and set in action a terrific, complicated mechanism of rumours that pretended to be sworn truth, of gossip that posed as evidence, of wild tarradiddles that good men most firmly believed."

In December 1915, the Society for Psychical Research, published a report on the Angel of Mons. According to Mark Valentine: "It concluded that many of the stories of visions on the battlefield were founded on mere rumour, no first-hand testimony was obtainable and detailed evidence was lacking.... Even if we conclude that some soldiers, in extreme conditions, may have thought they saw extraordinary things on the battlefield - and hard evidence of even that is distinctly lacking - yet no one can deny it was Machen's story that gave resonance and power to an image, an assurance, that many people in Britain wanted to believe in."

Philip Gibbs, a journalist working on the Western Front, agrees that his colleagues were partly responsible for promoting the myth of the Angel of Mons. "Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener's orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, and wild statement, rumour, fairy tale or deliberate lie, which reached them from France and Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time."

The Daily Mail was one of those newspapers that helped to publicize the Angel of Mons story. On August 24th 1915, it claimed that Private Robert Cleaver of the Cheshire Regiment had signed an affidavit to the effect that he had been present at Mons, and had seen a vision of angels with his own eyes. The following month it admitted that when it had checked Cleaver's claims it was discovered he was not in France at the time he said he saw it. An investigation conducted by the Society for Psychical Research in 1915 admitted: "Of first-hand testimony we have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon."

Primary Sources

(1) Brigadier-General John Charteris, the Chief Intelligence Officer at GHQ (5th September, 1914)

Then there is the story of the "Angels of Mons" going strong through the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress. Men's nerves and imagination play weird pranks in these strenuous times. All the same the angel at Mons interests me. I cannot find out how the legend arose.

(2) Ernest Sackville Turner, Dear Old Blighty (1980)

The legend of the Angels of Mons, whose shining presence put the German cavalry to flight, did not gain wide circulation until some weeks after the Retreat. In a diary entry dated September 5 General Charteris says the angelic rumour was being repeated in 2nd Corps, but possibly this reference was incorporated later. It is almost certain that the origin of the legend was a short story, The Bowmen, by Arthur Machen in the London Evening News of September 29, 1914. The inspiration for the tale, Machen says, came to him in church "as the blue incense floated above the Gospel Book on the desk between the tapers". It was a composite of the many legends in which heavenly hosts have come to the aid of the righteous in battle; also in his mind was Kipling's story of a ghostly Indian regiment. In Machen's tale a British soldier invokes St George to help his hard-pressed comrades and the sky fills with the spirits of the Agincourt bowmen, who annihilate the Germans with ghostly arrows. Machen denied that he "stole" rumours from the battlefield; and he also denied that the whole thing had been presented to him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting.

However, many of the public were ready to believe that angelic hosts had prevented a German breakthrough. If miracles could happen in Judaea, why not in Flanders? Occultists and clergymen knew a good thing when they saw it and the legend began to find its way into sermons, pamphlets and parish magazines. How was it, some wondered, that out of the thousands who had survived the battle none had found the divine intercession worth mentioning at the time? Now, however, a handful of soldiers began to remember seeing something unusual. A lance-corporal with fifteen years' service said he had stood watching the vision for three-quarters of an hour: "We came over quiet and still - it took us that way." One of his mates cried, "God's with us" and that "kind of loosened us". Their captain, when they fell in to march, said, "Well, men, we can cheer up now; we've got Someone with us." The lance-corporal added: "I should be very sorry to make a fool of myself by telling a story merely to please anyone." Then the press discovered a lieutenant-colonel who said that, after Le Cateau, his column was accompanied by squadron upon squadron of ghostly horsemen.

(3) Arthur Machen, quoted in John Hammerton's, The Great War: I Was There (1938)

I looked out of my window one Sunday morning towards the end of August 1914, and saw some newspaper bills in front of the little shop over the way, and saw that the night had come . . . I have forgotten the detail of the newspaper account of [the retreat]; but I remember it was a tale to make the heart sink, almost to deep despair. It told of the British army in full retreat, nay, in headlong, desperate retreat, on Paris.... The correspondent rather pictured an army broken to fragments scattered abroad in confusion. It was hardly an army any more; it was a mob of shattered men ... And I suppose that in the first place it was to comfort myself that I thought of the story of the Bowmen, and wrote it in the early days of September.

(4) All Saints Parish Magazine in Clifton reported that two officer servings at Mons told Sarah Marrable about what they saw on the front-line (May 1915)

Both of whom had themselves seen the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans when they came right upon them during the retreat from Mons... One of Miss Marrable's friends, who was not a religious man, told her that he saw a troop of angels between us and the enemy. He has been a changed man ever since. The other man... and his company were retreating, they heard the German cavalry tearing after them ... They therefore turned round and faced the enemy, expecting nothing but instant death, when to their wonder they saw, between them and the enemy, a whole troop of angels. The German horses turned round terrified and regularly stampeded. The men tugged at their bridles, while the poor beasts tore away in every direction.

(5) Light Magazine (24th April, 1915)

Whether Mr Machen's story was pure invention or not, it was certainly stated in some quarters that a curious phenomenon had been witnessed by several officers and men in connection with the retreat from Mons. It took the form of a strange cloud interposed between the Germans and the British. Other wonders were heard or seen in connection with this cloud which, it seems, had the effect of protecting the British against the overwhelming hordes of the enemy.

(6) Times Literary Supplement (19th August, 1915)

Long after the war is over, and the facts of it have been recorded in histories, one of the most widely known events will be the appearance of St George and his angel-warriors in the defence of the British during the retreat from Mons. We say "known"; because posterity will "know" that the Saint came down. People "know" it already. The papers are full of the occurrence, and the testimony pours in from all sides. And here is Mr Arthur Machen roundly declaring that none of the testimony yet given is worth a rap: that the whole thing arose out a story which he himself made up out of his head, in church, and sent to the Evening News.

(7) Arthur Machen explained his story, The Bowman, in The Daily Mail (28th July, 1915)

A British soldier finds himself one out of a thousand companions who are occupying a Salient against a furious cannonade and the attack of ten thousand German infantry. The holding of this salient, for a time at least, is vital. Its capture means the turning of the Allied left flank, and that means ruin for France and England. The British see that the position is hopeless. Their guns are overwhelmed and shot to bits by the enemy's artillery: their numbers are reduced from a thousand to five hundred. They know that they are doomed to death beyond all hope or help: and they shoot on as calmly as if they were at Bisley.

Then the soldier - my soldier - remembers the motto that appears on all the plates in the vegetarian restaurant in St Martin's Lane: Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius - May St. George be a present help to the English. He utters this prayer mechanically; and falls instantly into a waking vision. He hears a voice, mighty as a thunder-peal, crying, "Array, array, array!" and the spirits of the old English bowmen obey the command of their patron and ours. The soldier hears their war-cries: "Harrow, harrow! St George, be quick to help us." "Dear saint, succour us!" He sees the flight of their arrows darkening the air.

And the other men, to their amazement, see the Germans melting from before them. In a moment a whole regiment crashes to the ground. The men cannot make out what is happening; they suppose a reserve of machine guns may have been brought up. At all events, as one says to another, the Germans "have got it in the neck." And the soldier who is in the world of vision goes on shooting till the man next to him clouts him on the head and tells him not to waste the King's ammunition on dead Germans.

(8) Arthur Machen, TP's Weekly (27th November 1915)

It was all so entirely innocent, nay casual, on my part. A poor linnet of prose, I did but perform my indifferent piping in the Evening News because I wanted to do so, because I felt that the story of "The Bowmen" ought to be told... and then, somehow or other, it was as if I had touched the button and set in action a terrific, complicated mechanism of rumours that pretended to be sworn truth, of gossip that posed as evidence, of wild tarradiddles that good men most firmly believed.

(9) Philip Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism (1923)

Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener's orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, and wild statement, rumour, fairy tale or deliberate lie, which reached them from France and Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time.

(10) Private Frank Richards served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on the Western Front. This is a passage from his book, Old Soldiers Never Die (1933)

If any angels were seen on the retirement they were seen that night. March, march, for hour after hour, without a halt; we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between. Stevens said: "There's a fine castle there, see?" pointing to one side of the road. But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat.