Read&Write

The legend of the Angel of Mons was a story written in The Evening News by Arthur Machen on September 29th, 1914 about an incident during the Battle of Mons in 1914, the first battle in which the British were engaged – and victorious at one point in driving back the Germans but, being vastly outnumbered, were forced into retreat the following day. The battle was fought in and around the town of Mons, across the Canal du Centre on the edge of town. Though the British had superior weaponry, their numbers were too few and the Germans were eventually able to cross the canal on one remaining bridge and outflank the British, which forced them to retreat.

Arthur Machen had read an account of the battle and the retreat before going off to Mass. During the service, as the priest gave his sermon, Machen wrote in his mind a different story he later titled “The Soldiers’ Rest” but the story he wrote and subsequently had published was “The Bowmen.”

The Bowmen

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battlesong, “Good-bye, good-bye to Tipperary,” ending with “And we shan’t get there”. And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, “What price Sidney Street?” And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.

“World without end. Amen,” said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered—he says he cannot think why or wherefore—a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius—May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass—300 yards away—he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King’s ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.

For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, “Array, array, array!”

His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him,
as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons.
He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: “St. George! St.
George!”
“Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!”

“St. George for merry England!”

“Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us.”

“Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow.”

“Heaven’s Knight, aid us!”

And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley. Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English, “Gawd help us!” he bellowed to the man next to him, “but we’re blooming marvels! Look at those grey… gentlemen, look at them! D’ye see them? They’re not going down in dozens, nor in ‘undreds; it’s thousands, it is. Look! look! there’s a regiment gone while I’m talking to ye.”

“Shut it!” the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, “what are ye gassing about!”

But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.

All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: “Harow! Harow!
Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!”
“High Chevalier, defend us!”

The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.

“More machine guns!” Bill yelled to Tom.

“Don’t hear them,” Tom yelled back. “But, thank God, anyway; they’ve got it in the neck.”

In fact, 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.

With the publication of the story, the reading public was captured by it with fascination and awe, taking it as truth. The story, as published, had been titled “The Bowmen” and only acquired the title “Angels of Mons” after a priest of the pulpit interpreted the description of these “shining” bowmen as must having been Angels.

Not long after, the author reported, after having been squarely asked, that it had not been labeled as fiction, as it should have been and wrote a disclaimer that it was indeed a fabrication of his own imagination. The story was published in pamphlet at the request of the church and immediately grew in notice and popularity.

The public would have none of it. The fate of the story had been sealed. The people believed it to be true, therefore it was, without doubt, true. The story spread like wildfire through pubs and pulpits, claimed as “proof” that God was indeed on the side of the Allies.

No matter how many times and ways the author tried to clarify the facts, the public had taken possession of the story as truth and dared anyone, even to the point of many accusing naysayers of treason, to refute its authenticity. Machen further published the story along with other short stories in book form, including a lengthy introduction where he apologized and strived in earnest to set the record straight.

This extended story of the Angel of Mons reveals a fundamental error in humanity’s interpretation and engagement with spiritual truths.

First, the story was taken at face value with fervor due to the deep seeded need for the people to be provided with some solid foundation on which they could justify the tragedy of the war before them and the husbands, fathers and brothers who had either already been lost in the fray, or faced with heightened certainty of such a fate.

Second, such embracing of a fiction as truth – even if it indeed were true – was used in a completely material way. It was used to pull the spiritual down to earth, to “harden” it as it were, into the material realm to justify the evil of war.

Spiritual truth is meant to lift humanity up into the heavenly realms, not to be dragged down into the muck and mire of what we can otherwise call “no man’s land” of what we have made of life on Earth. Those who would call such statements “lofty” and not of any value for life on Earth are not only terribly mistaken, but further evidence of the illness of which humanity suffers to this day.

Angels are indeed surrounding us – every day and in many ways. They are a spiritual truth. And whether or not their were Angels pulling bows and firing arrows to ward of the enemy in those days it matters little. For the Angels can only help those who seek such assistance. We must cease from using Spiritual Truths, Angels, as spiritual figureheads for our material gains and humble ourselves to the reality that Angels are beings, spiritual beings as we are spiritual beings. We must become cognizant of the reality that an Angels’ purpose is to aid in the further spiritual development of humanity. They do not exist to serve us as we deem necessary. This is akin to the misunderstanding of the place of the animals and plants and minerals of Earth in the hierarchy of creation. They are not there to serve us, but we are here to serve, to protect, to nurture, them. In the same vein, if I may diverge for a moment, governments exist to serve the people. The people are not here to serve governments.

It is time in the epochs of human (spiritual) evolutionary development that we “climb down off our high horse” and begin to engage in the REAL REALITY of who, and what, we truly are.

As a postscript, my Grandfather, who served as a Sergeant Major in the Headquarters Division of the 316th Engineers in the 91st Division of the AEF in the Meuse Argonne Offensive in 1918, had a similar experience. During his training at Camp Lewis in the state of Washington in 1917, one evening he had come in late to his barracks. As he did so, another soldier asked him to stoke the coals in the oven. The following day he was pulled aside by a Gypsy compatriot who served in the same unit. This soldier informed him, that as my Grandfather stoked the fire in the oven the evening before, this man witnessed an entity floating above him as he did so. This entity was described as a woman dressed in victorian clothing of the century before.

In a letter to his mother, my Great Grandmother, my Grandfather shared this story. I have the letter and as I write don’t remember his exact comment on the matter, but in all of his subsequent writings and records of his I have in my possession (well over 150 letters and other documents) there is no other mention of this episode.

What was this apparition? An Angel? An ancestor watching over him? The incident is what we make of it. The fact is, there is a lot about life we do not understand. Reality reaches depths of which we cannot conceive. I truly believe that if anything is possible, then it is probable.

The sad truth is that we have turned the supranatural, the spiritual, into beings and experiences that come to us not from the spiritual realms, but rather other planets and solar systems. This is again a terrible misunderstanding of reality.

Regarding my Grandfather, whatever the being was that hovered over him that evening, he most surely had some form of blessing and protection which sought his survival of the cruelest war yet perpetrated by humanity to date, shared by every other survivor – of both sides – of World War One. Was it Heaven watching over these fortunate souls? Maybe. Maybe each had a karmic purpose for their survival and went on to helping humanity in some form or fashion, whether they knew it or not. For my Grandfather, his survival later ensured an experience bore out of the war that lasted through the intervening years between the two world wars. It is that experience of which I am very near completing an historical fiction novel about. It is a story of redemption – the redemption of hate into love, the brotherhood of mankind and the peace that passes the understanding of the material human being.

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