Angels of Mons: World War One legend
During the midst of battle, the onslaughts continued as the heavily outnumbered British troops
tried to retreat as the Germans pursued them every step of the way across the fields and heavily wooded area around the Mons-Condé Canal.
Then just as all seemed lost for the British, legend goes that heavenly angels appeared over the battlefield
encouraging them to stand and fight
Suddenly, behind the British troops appeared the ghostly bowmen of Agincourt, led by Saint George himself
firing volley after volley of deadly arrows causing the Germans to fall in their hundreds.
The year was 1914 and the place was the Battle of Mons in the centre of the Belgian coal producing region near the French border.
The reality was that the Battle of Mons, on August 23rd, 1914, was a bloody affair with between three thousand six hundred to seven thousand casualties in just one day of fighting
It was the British Army's first real battle of the First World War and was a taste of the years of bloody carnage that laid ahead
What happened was that a vastly outnumbered British force was defending against a German attack that resulted in heavy fighting and in the end forced an
Exhausted British force to retreat in an orderly fashion
Within a few months after the battle,
stories started to circulate back in Britain by both word-of-mouth and the press that
Heavenly angels and ghostly medieval English bowmen had intervened during the battle to aid the British. There were many quoted
supposedly "first-hand" accounts of these visions, and it was said many official documents existed supporting this spiritual phenomenon.
There was even meant to be a testimony from captured German soldiers that they had seen the angels and bowmen too.
The truth of the matter is, none of this was ever proven, though
there is a wealth of official documents from before, during, and after the battle. None of these mention any spiritual visions of any kind.
The supposed testimony of captured German soldiers was never found.
After the war, when investigators tried again to find any evidence about the event,
they were hampered by the fact that very few British soldiers who were at Mons survived the war. So was it mass hysteria?
Unlikely, as there was no mention of it in regimental reports or soldiers' letters home. The hallucinations of battle weary British soldiers?
Again, unlikely.
They may have been exhausted, but the battle was relatively short, and at that stage, the British Army was mostly made up of
professional soldiers who were well trained to handle the stress of a battle. Also, British morale was high
They had inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans earlier that day, and then rather than fall back in disarray,
they had carried out a well-organized tactical withdrawal to stop themselves from being overrun.
So was it some kind of propaganda by the British intelligence?
There could well be some truth in this theory. Thought it's unlikely that they started the story,
they did not go out of their way to quash it, and some theorized
it was seen by the British military as a morale booster both back home and at the frontline to
believe that spiritual forces were on their side.
The answer to the whole mystery could well be that about a month after the Battle of Mons, a
popular writer, Arthur Machen wrote a short fictitious story called "The Bowmen" for the London newspaper, The Evening News.
Using the battle as inspiration, Machen never had any intention for the story to be taken as fact.
But the newspaper forgot to mark it as fictional. Also, Machen had written the story from the first-person perspective,
unintentionally making it sound as if it was real.
Then the whole thing quickly snowballed out of control as some parish magazines published the story,
failing to highlight the story as made up and soon, "The Bowmen", despite Machen's constant denial,
became seen as fact, not fiction, in the public's eye.
When Machen published the story as part of a book called "The Bowmen and Other Legends of War" with an introduction
denying that the story was true and stating in the introduction about all the falsehoods
the story had created, the unintended hoax had already cemented itself as truth.
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