Arthur Machen and the Angels of Mons
The Bowmen
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche Born March 3, 1863, Arthur Machen was an writer of fantastic and horror fiction whose work remains influential to this day. However, probably his biggest contribution to the culture, much to his chagrin, was the legend of the Angels of Mons.
In September, 1914, Machen's "The Bowmen," a story inspired by accounts he had heard of the Battle of Mons, appeared in London's The Evening News. In the real-life battle, outnumbered British troops defeated a much larger German force. In Machen's story, the British were assisted by phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt, summoned by a soldier calling on St. George.
Because the story was not labeled as fiction, was told in first person and was in any event intended as a "false document," something Machen did frequently, meant that many readers interpreted this account as fact.
Parish magazines then reprinted the story with Machen's permission, and sermons were given using the "legend" as proof that God was on King George's side. Machen repeatedly tried to inform the reprinters that his story was fiction; he was sometimes informed that he must be mistaken. As Wikipedia quotes him from the introduction to the book version of The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War:
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.
The story was passed on further through oral accounts. Machen's description of a line of shapes became a line of shining beings -- the bowmen had become angels. In 1915, the British magazine Spiritualist reported on eyewitness acounts of supernatural forces helping the British at Mons.
But also in 1915, the Society for Psychical Research decided the so-called eyewitness reports did not support the interpretation that anything supernatural had occurred at Mons. There has even been the suggestion that the supposed reports of stories being told of the Angels of Mons came from British officers who were part of a covert propaganda campaign to improve morale and support the war effort.
As late as 1931, Brigadier-General John Charteris claimed in his memoirs that the story had been a rumor among the troops in 1914, but Charteris was also responsible for spreading other false rumors about the war.
Machen found "The Bowman" coming back to haunt him till the day he died, and got rather tired of it. Even after Machen's death in 1947, stories of the Angels of Mons continued to proliferate. In 2001, it was claimed that film and photographic evidence had been found to support the appearance of the angels -- a film deal was hinted at and reported in Variety and the Los Angeles Times. It turned out to be a hoax.
Reportedly, stories of the Angels of Mons are still sometimes presented as factual accounts have appeared frequently in New Age and Christian sources.
Image from FantasticFiction.co.uk. Info from Wikipedia.