Visions at War

Kevin McClure. Visions of Angels and Bowmen: Mons 1914. Available on-line at:
http://moremagonia.blogspot.com/2011/09/mufob-new-series-1975-1979.html
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The story of the Angels of Mons, as usually told, is a simple one: a story by Arthur Machen, the writer of supernatural fiction, describing a miraculous vision appearing to soldiers on the battlefield, was published in September 1914, and was immediately taken to be a true account, thus starting the legend However, Kevin McClure's pamphlet surveys the evidence and concludes that, not for the first time, the sceptical version of the story is as much an over-simplification as the more credulous versions.

To begin with, there is some evidence that the rumour was around before Machen's story was published. The war diaries of General John Charteris, Sir Douglas Haig's chief-of-staff, published in 1931, mention the rumour as being current by September 5th, 1914, three weeks before the publication of the Machen story. It is possible that, like some others who keep diaries with a view to eventual publication, Charteris only made brief notes on the day in question, later writing them up at leisure. If so he may have later confused the Angel legend with some much vaguer tale of supernatural visions.

Far from immediately following the publication of the Machen story the first appearances of the legend in print did not come until the spring of 1915. They appeared in a variety of forms, but chiefly involved angelic beings who had interposed between the retreating British troops and the advancing Germans, whereas in Machen's story the supernatural figures had been the ghosts of the bowmen of Agincourt. Machen denied having heard such rumours and then used them as the basis of his story, but it would not have been the only time he had done this. An earlier story, The Great Return describing the reappearance of the Holy Grail in a 20th century Welsh village, begins with the narrator reading reports of lights in the sky, clearly inspired by the 1905 wave of Welsh sightings.

The different places where the story appeared indicated its appeal to different audiences. For readers of the Church Family Newspaper it would have been a simple proof that God was on Britain's side. For the Society for Psychic Research and other Spiritualist oriented journals, it was a case which could potentially be investigated and authenticated, thus establishing evidence for higher powers not dependent on the authority of established religion. Unfortunately, the evidence that was amassed simply consisted of the same story retailed at second-hand, and accounts by witnesses who were alleged to be reliable but chose to remain anonymous, such as are familiar from contemporary UFO retrieval and satanic cult tales.

A third source of the legend was the leading Catholic journal, The Universe. This is interesting since at the time Irish Catholics made up a disproportionate number of British soldiers, and their cultural influences can be discerned in other legends of the war. The most notable such case is the World War I version of the Phantom Hitch-hiker, which tells of two soldiers driving a cart or lorry who give a lift to a young nun. Their passenger delivers a prophesy (usually that the war will end by a certain date) and mysteriously vanishes. The two soldiers later discover that her face is identical to the statue of the Virgin Mary in a local church. A similar tale, showing even more clearly the influence of Irish tales of moving statues, is that of the Virgin of Bapaume. After this Western Front town was shelled, the statue of the Virgin teetered for months at the top of the ruined church tower. Army legend claimed that when it finally fell the war would end: it did fall, only weeks before the end of the war.

While Kevin McClure's study has done a creditable job of collecting the original sources of the legend, I fed it would have been stronger had it examined the wider context of wartime legends. Even more persuasive than the Angels legends. and just as mysterious, was that of the Russian Army that allegedly passed through Britain by troop trains in August 1914. A 1970's researcher who wrote to local papers appealing for information on this tale actually received accounts from elderly people who claimed to remember the Russian soldiers, a fact that clearly indicates the problems of witness testimony to long-past events.

It would also have been interesting to see the legend related to the revival in pre-World War I England of the cults of St George and King Arthur (discussed the the historian Mark Girouard in his book The Retum from Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman).

After the war the Angels were largely forgotten. Nobody, as far as I know, has argued that they were misidentifications of pre-1947 UFOs or their occupants in the way that has been done for the Fatima visions. The reason the legend has been assigned to oblivion is probably less to do with lack of evidence than the fact that the unquestioning combination of religion and nationa1ism was discredited by the carnage of the war. When England was again in peril in 1940 rumours told not of divine assistance, but of death rays and other secret weapons that would save the nation. However. as the 20th century draws to its close, and in the Middle East and the Balkans armies once more march under the banners of religion, it may be that similar tales will reappear. – Roger Sandell (Magonia 47)